What do water, fuel, flour, and electricity have in common?

That’s an odd combination. In fact, that’s the short list. The long list includes:

All of this is the MFRFP: Multi Functional Rural Fuel Platform. Starting with vegetable oil seeds, such as soybeans, this machine performs all these functions. Multi-functional platforms have been around for several years, but this appears to be the first one that incorporates refining the source material into a fuel for immediate use – it produces diesel, kerosene and gasoline. In fact, whereas previous units use conventional fossil-based diesel to fuel the engine that drives all it’s functions, this unit generates it’s own fuel. This both sets it apart from it’s predecessors, and makes this machine a renewable energy device. I’ll say it again: it runs off the very fuel it produces, and produces far more fuel than it needs. It will run for 10 hours on 3 gallons of fuel, and produces 8 gallons of fuel per hour.

Because this unit is self-sustaining, it is no longer limited to providing just a municipal type of benefit to the community in which it is installed, as previous units did. In the MFRFP site’s own words: “With it’s fuel generation capability, it provides the missing piece of the development puzzle by enabling poor, rural communities to generate cash from the sales of fuel produced in the community. The ability to earn money is the missing piece in the rural development puzzle that has plagued the aid community and developing world alike in their poverty alleviation efforts for the last 30 years. The MFRFP provides an opportunity for poor, rural communities to join the global trading system and sell a valuable commodity to the world. In this way, the MFRFP’s revenue stream provides the ability to turn the conventional thinking on providing aid to poor, rural communities on its head. The MFRFP for the first time provides entrepreneurial and job opportunities for the local populations living in poor, rural communities that are far more lucrative than can be found in cities or in other countries.”

Check it out at http://www.mfrfp.org/