Click on the image to see the stove in action.
Nathaniel Mulcahy’s speaks with the urgency and precision of someone on a mission and with little time.
Although he has patiently and politely dedicated the better part of an hour to our conversation, I know that the moment he hangs up he will be off to complete a million tasks on his to-do list.
Mulcahy has good reasons to be in a hurry. The first one is that he cheated death seven years ago following a really bad accident, so he’s a man on his second chance.
The second reason, which is linked to the first, is that he is determined to bring energy-efficient cookstoves to the world’s 2.4 billion people who sit at the bottom of the world’s energy ladder. They are the poorest of the poor who lack access to modern fuels and must make do with wood, charcoal, and animal dung to meet their everyday energy needs.
About 2 million energy poor — mostly women and children — die each year from the effects of long term exposure to smoky indoor air. Dependence on biomass for fuel helps perpetuate the poverty cycle and can add significant stress to the environment. “Black carbon,” a byproduct of inefficient biomass combustion, may contribute as much to climate change each year as deforestation and land conversion.
Taking from the Energy Rich to pay for the Energy Poor
Mulcahy is the founder of WorldStove, a small Italy and U.S.-based company that manufactures a range of energy efficient, biomass-burning cookstoves. The company operates two business lines. One sells pricey cookstoves and barbeque grills for the outdoor/camping crowd in industrialized societies. The other line of stoves, the research of which is funded by the former, helps bring energy efficient cookstoves and locally owned businesses that produce them, to the oceans of energy poor people around the world who don’t have access to modern fuels like LPG and electricity.
Mulcahy has recently returned from Haiti where he spent two months setting the foundations for a sustained long-term plan to alleviate the country’s heavy dependence on the inefficient combustion of the wood and charcoal. President Bill Clinton, the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, highlighted WorldStove’s remarkable and quick work in Haiti in a recent Earth Day address. (Read the Huffington Post’s comprehensive interview with Mulcahy about his work in Haiti.)
Mulcahy standing next to large-scale stove handsomely decorated by Haitian artisans.
Mulcahy was gracious enough to sandwich us in between meetings and a series of long overdue trips to sub-Saharan Africa.
The Charcoal Project: What is WorldStove’s competitive advantage and why hasn’t the stove caught the world by storm?
Nathaniel Mulcahy: We have five main competitive advantages. The first is that for each country we go to, we adapt our stoves to local cooking traditions and available biomasses. Secondly, our stoves are specifically designed for mass production which allows for a higher quality, lower priced product. There is a great need for this. If all of the stove makers right now were to produce at full capacity, we would still not meet the needs of the 2.5 billion people who need them. Third, we don’t actually sell individual stoves, we help set up locally owned and operated, self-sustaining businesses. Fourth, careful application of fluid dynamics has allowed for lower emissions and higher combustion efficiencies. Because they produce biochar, the stoves are also CO2 negative. Fifth, our stoves can be made from recycled materials and at the end of their lives are fully recyclable.
We are a new company, things are taking off. Ask me the same question in a year.
So what’s the plan, Nathaniel?
Over the past 149 years inventors have submitted on average about 30 new cookstove patents each year. That means the cookstove community has been at it for about a century and half, with over 4,500 patents and we still can’t get better cookstoves into the hands of the billions who need them. Part of the problem is marketing and communications. And part of the problem is funding.
Too often, new technologies force people to abandon their traditions. This makes it less likely that the technology will be adopted. By adapting the stoves to the people rather than the other way around we respect traditions and increase the likelihood of success of the programs from place to place. When it comes to stoves, it can’t be one size fits all.
This is one area where we have an advantage because our cookstoves are carefully adapted to take into account the local customs and needs in each country.
For example, in Ethiopia the stove has a mitad (a flat metal surface) used to cook injera, their typical bread. In Burkina Faso they like the three-rocks-and-a-pot approach, which means they like to cook close to the ground. So we actually modified the stove so it could be partially buried in the ground. In western China nan bread is a staple, so we adapted an oven to the stove there. Our stove for Mongolia,runs 24 hours and it is used to cook and heat, so that’s an improvement that takes into account the people’s needs.
We had to do the same thing in Haiti recently. 
There, because many people are living in refugee camps, with many children doing the cooking, and in very close proximity to each other, we had to devise a protective heat shield. Haiti is very windy, too, so the shield actually served two functions. We also paid close attention to the local cooking habits and we noticed they use up to seven or eight pots and pans to cook a meal. This makes it a challenge but we came up with a solution that accommodates this need. Smoke is also a problem when you live in close quarters but as a negative pressure pyrolytic gasifier, the stove produces very little smoke.
TCP: So the Lucia Stove is adaptable. What can you tell us about its production?
NM: The way we make and pack the stoves makes it easy to scale up production quickly. Our components are made in the US and Italy and are flat-packed, which makes them easy to transport. That means we can fit 1000 stoves in a one cubic meter box and ship that for the same price it would cost to send 30 assembled stoves.
Our business model is that we first do a pilot program, The pilot determines the business feasibility of setting up a stove hub. It also gives us an opportunity to study the local available waste biomass and understand what cultural adaptations are needed for the stove.. As a new company, this still varies a bit from project to project. For example, most recently in Haiti we went in as a hybrid of a humanitarian aid and pilot program. .. We have made this our business model because this approach also leads to the creation of local jobs and more thorough use of the biochar.
It also helps us keep unit costs down by shipping the stove flat packed. Think about it. If a stove costs $8 each but it costs $60 to ship, you effectively are trying to sell poor people a $68 stove.
TCP: I wanted ask you about that. How do you price your stove?
NM: They are priced from project to project. In some cases the costs are supplemented, others have micro-financed options, and in all cases the final price is determined by the local market and the cost of manufacturing the regionally specific adaptations of the stoves. For example, a stove that produces just an open flame will cost less than a stove with an incorporated bread oven or that can be used as a heater.
TCP: How does the micro-financework?
NM: Let’s take Burkina-Faso as an example. For the sake of argument, suppose it costs a family $2 buy their daily ration of wood or charcoal fuel. What we do is that we sell them the stove for $1 dollar and then they can pay the balance over time. This means that starting on day one the family has an extra $1 they did not have before. So it’s already saving them money.
TCP: So the stove’s pyrolysis combustion reduced indoor air pollution, it alleviates poverty, what does it do for the local environment and for climate change?
NM: It does a lot, actually. The stove is designed to burn just about any biomass, except wood and charcoal. This was an intentional decision. We prefer the stove to use pelletized biomass for consistent performance and ease of use. This also provides additional jobs for the people processing the waste biomass into pellets. By adding value to waste biomass, it discourages people from leaving large piles of waste biomass to rot or be burnt. For example, in Egypt the equivalent of one fourth the annual cooking fuel needs for all of Egypt is burned annually, at the end of the rice harvest. In some cases, where a specific biomass is available all year, we can tune the stove to use that specific biomass.
By designing a stove than can run on just about anything — peanut shells, rice husks, corn stalks, corn cobs (without the kernels), small branches, sugar cane bagasse, wheat chaff, animal waste, bamboo, palletized grasses, sawdust, wood shaving, lumber yard scrap, even used vegetable oil – we are using biomass that does not require the destruction of timber resources. This means less stress on the local environment.
With regard to climate change, the most important thing to know is that this stove is carbon negative. This means the stove emits less C02 than if the biomass had been burnt using three-rocks-and-a-pot. What’s more, the CO2 produced by the stove is actually sequestered in the form of biochar. Biochar has come to be seen as a very valuable substance that can be used for many purposes, especially to enrich the soils in exhausted agricultural lands. That’s one reason why the stove is very attractive to country like Haiti, where the soil is so depleted of nutrients. 
In a place like Haiti, we are using what they call the Clinton briquettes for fuel, but the stove is also designed to burn palletized biomass, which we are working to produce locally.
TCP: This stove sounds like it has all the right features and more. Going back to our first question, what ingredients are you missing see the accelerated adoption of the Lucia cookstove worldwide? What’s on your wishlist?
I think a single large donation would help kick start many of the programs that at this point have been only pilots. If all of our pilots were able to make it to the stove hub phase, people who are trained at the individual hubs would then be able to start stove hubs of their own. From that point on a domino effect would make the program succeed worldwide.
To find out more about WorldStove and the LuciaStove, or get involved please visit: worldstove.org
About the Lucia Stove
Watch Mulcahy demonstrate the Lucia Stove.
The crown jewel in the WorldStove collection is the LuciaStove. It is a remarkable piece of engineering. It’s beautiful, clean lines are a testament to its impeccable engineering pedigree — Mulcahy was R&D Director at Emerson Appliance for several years.
Lift the hood of the Lucia and that’s where you’ll really be dazzled. The Lucia’s components are sturdy and fit together with the precision of a Swiss Army knife. That’s because the top and bottom are injection molded, which means they are produced using high precision equipment, the kind used to manufacture robotic parts and jet engines.
Where the Lucia really excels is in performance. Unlike conventional wood or charcoal-burning stoves (like my Weber grill sitting in my backyard at home in Brooklyn), the Lucia uses a combination of engineered fluid dynamics to enter into pyrolytic mode which creates better combustion and generates sustained high heat with very little smoke or ash residue. (Yes, it’s over my head, too!)
Fibonacci series swirls and fluid dynamics never looked so good.
What’s important to remember is that the basic LuciaStove is remarkable for the following characteristics:
1. Adaptable to user habits, needs, wishes, cooking habits, and available fuel
2. Low cost to make and ship (ships flat)
3. Life tested to last ten years
4. EU emissions certified (66 ppmCO)
5. Consumable parts are replaceable
6. Can function either as a coaxial gasifier or a pyrolytic stove (Don’t worry about this part. It’s not on the test.)
7. Adaptable to almost any type of fan or can even be used without
8. Creates local workforce opportunities and earnings
9. And at the end of its life is recyclable
10. And most importantly it is scalable.
For those concerned with CO2 emissions, one more reason to love the Lucia is because it’s carbon negative. This means that the stove sequesters more CO2 than is produced when operating in pyrolytic mode.
The Lucia stove is named after Mulcahy's canine companion who saved his life.
… or think before you stove.
Terrace cultivation and the barren hills of Yunnan.
With its clinical, scientific approach to environmental conservation, it determined that the growing pressure on the dwindling vegetation constituted a major stress to the region’s unique environment. The signs were clear: woodfuel collection alone contributed to the loss of 300,000 acres of forest each year.
And, so, a stove project was born. Funds were raised, stove designs were selected, a distribution network was established. Stove were handed out. Targets were met.
Things began to unravel when the project managers discovered that the households were not adopting the stoves as planned. They were instead being cast out of the house. Cue the anthropologist, who discovered that project managers had overlooked a critical cultural factor: the sacred significance of a permanent, visible open flame in the home. A simple fix solved the problem.
Teaching the local population how to use the stove.
This story ended well and to date almost 20,000 stoves and other energy efficient appliances have been distributed in the region.
Stepping in the carcasses of stove projects
But what about all the other abandoned stove projects that litter the world? How much money have donors invested in ill-conceived stove designs, poorly executed marketing campaigns, and lack of investment in capacity building?
I raise this question because my recent conversation with Andree Sosler of the Darfur Stove Project forced me to rethink one of my cherished assumptions: that local stove production was the only way to go. My assumption was that locally produced stoves generated buy-in, jobs, and new markets for a locally produced good. (Read the end of story to find out why I was wrong.)
Learning is never ending
Pondering my own misconception, I realized that there is probably a lot of aggregate and valuable knowledge out there from all the failed stove projects around the world. But how do these lessons get shared and re-applied? How do the wise men and women in the bioenergy community learn from other people’s mistakes? We need to think about this if we’re serious about tackling large-scale energy poverty relief through the adoption of energy efficient stoves, kilns, and briquettes.
I found some answers in a thoughtful paper on why the Improved Charcoal Stove (ICS) project in Tanzania failed to catch on in the late 90s. The paper reveals a number of major flaws in the project. Here are some of the highlights.
Capacity Training
“Of more than the 1000 artisans trained to build the Kenyan-adapted jiko stove, some among the group were taught only how to build a part of the stove, not the entire contraption. “In addition, others learned via apprenticeships or by simply copying designs, which leads to products of variable quality. The problem of having poor quality stoves on the market is a persistent one, and has ‘tarnished the image’ of the ICS.”
Materials and standards
In addition to the insufficient training, the report identifies several other reasons for the failure, including, “First, the quality of materials cannot be reliably obtained. For example, rice husks ash is a necessary input for a stove, but there is not a formal market for it, so producers must depend upon personal relations with ginnery operators. Second, many producers lack sufficient capital to purchase the appropriate materials, and therefore they substitute materials of lower quality. Third, there is not an agreement even among the most experienced producers on the established standards for a stove.”
The Market
Financially, it appeared that the cost of production and the cost of the units to households made it difficult for a producer to reconcile cost and expenses.
Institutional support
In the Institutional category, the report cites the “lack of a coordinated source of information about stove design, materials, training, and marketing of the products. The report recommended the establishment of an information center to meet this need.”
Policy void
Under the Policy rubric, the report identifies “the inability to obtain approved production sites for small-scale production is one of the most significant barriers that face ICS producers. There is no procedure for allocating small plots of businesses, and thus many ICS producers remain informal despite having business licenses. This creates instability and hinders the sector’s development.”
Barefoot and in the kitchen. Not!
Finally, in probing the challenges of scaling up the project, the report points to the absence of women in the marketing and production process. “The reported noted that women have not been actively involved in the promotion of the stoves, but since women are the primary users, their involvement is critical.”
Courtesy of Envirofit
Part of the reason why I felt compelled to write this post is because of Haiti, where the recent tragedy has unleashed a rush of programs to bring energy efficiency to the country’s devastated population.
We hope they are all well thought out and executed.
Kim
IDP village in North Kivu, DRC
A few weeks ago a story in the Financial Times led with the stove project of Mercy Corps, a relief agency working in camp for Internally Displaced People in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.
We wanted to know more so we sent a list of questions to Elisha Moore-Delate. She is the Environment Program Manager for Mercy Corps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the person responsible for the stoves program.
We’re sharing her inspiring and insightful responses below.
Stoves in the atelier ready for distribution
1. When, and how, did you realize that introducing energy efficient stoves would help improve conditions for the IDPs?
Energy Efficient Stoves and their need is something that has been and is easily recognized by people who witness the marginal lands where Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the DRC are often placed. In this case, IDPs lived on the volcanic lava stone of two past eruptions. They have very limited earth to cultivate and very few trees (with the exception of those found in or along nearby Virunga National Park) available for families to collect as fuel wood. Charcoal, the main fuel wood substitute, is expensive and was not what was previously used by the majority of IDPs in their homes of origin.(They presumably used wood.) Thus the need for fuel efficient stoves is real and the impact of fuel savings is tangible. With fuel efficient stoves (depending on the stove type) families can often cut their fuel wood consumption in half. Our stoves have been tested and show results of fuel wood reductions by 60% among beneficiaries and 71% in our lab testing. This translates into savings all around: saving the forests and protecting a world heritage site, and saving lives put in danger during wood collection.
Efficient Stove model
2. How has this project improved the lives of women, children?
It has improved their lives by reducing indoor air pollution and smoke inhalation compared to a traditional fire. It has also allowed women to spend less time on menial yet dangerous tasks such as fuel wood collection, where they must travel sometimes 14km to collect wood. It allows them to spend more time pursuing other activities that could generate income or could be spent studying or going to school. It helps people adopt more efficient methods of cooking and should overall help make their difficult lives just a small bit easier. It also provides a form of employment for more than 300 men and women who construct the stoves themselves.
3. What criteria did you use to find the right stove?
Before I started on the project, in October 2008 Mercy Corps conducted a number of cooking tests and focus groups to examine which stove type they should select. The study found that beneficiaries in the camps preferred a clay model. This was based on their prior stove experience and fear of fires- metal stoves heat up and with the small huts so close together fires can be extremely dangerous for people who have already been displaced. The people we surveyed also recognized that they wanted a stove that would hold the pot when stirring foufou, a local staple food. Unfortunately the stove model initially selected did not meet the minimal 50% wood reductions we were aiming for. When I arrived, Mercy Corps began looking at the project through a carbon reduction lens, we realized we needed a model that was more efficient but could still help us achieve our development objectives. Those objectives are 1) the inclusion and employment of women, 2) creating employment or a source of funds for IDPs who have little income and are largely dependent upon their food rations provided by the World Food Program 3) to build up capacity and skill levels of the IDPs, 4) to positively impact the environment and 5) to improve the security of the IDPs, especially women.
4. How hard or easy has it been to get the community to accept the stoves?
It was very easy for them to accept the stoves. They see the real need and welcome the opportunity to use them.
5. Did you give any consideration to implementing a briquettes program as well?
We are working with African Conservation Fund who is already implementing a briquette program here in North Kivu. Prior to the recent closure of several IDP camps, Mercy Corps and WWF were the largest consumers of briquettes because we purchased them and then Mercy Corps distributed them to 4200 vulnerable IDPs. Mercy Corps does not want to duplicate these efforts with our own briquette program. Instead we would prefer to collaborate with the existing program and strengthen their capacity to further develop the briquette market.
6. Do you think this program can be a model for displaced people elsewhere?
Other organizations are currently implementing similar stove programs for displaced people in conflict and post-conflict places, like Darfur for example. What is innovative about our program is that we combine the distribution of stoves with an agro-forestry program which allows displaced people to also access land to cultivate and increase their food security. This component provides planted trees to the owners and food for the IDPS. We also have an environmental education component that was designed to show our beneficiaries environmentally friendly ways to generate income upon their return home. It focused on composting, briquette making, permaculture, beekeeping, leguminous and arborous nursery management and animal husbandry. These activities showed IDPs and the local population who lived near the camps how it is possible to have profitable harvests on marginal lands.
Elisha Moore-Delate and Edwige Kavuo speaking to project beneficiaries who receive the stove models above.
7. Are there any plans to roll this out elsewhere within the Mercy Corps programs?
Yes, there are. I believe that one of Mercy Corps’ strengths is that we take each situation individually and don’t apply a cookie cutter method. Something that works in the DRC may not work exactly the same way in another country. You need to look at the culture, resources available, the environmental impact of such a program and the overall need before implementing a program. In Indonesia, for example, we have a similar stoves project, but there we’ve focused on the production of stoves and creating a market for people to sell them. The focus is more on income generation rather than immediate humanitarian needs and human security. We are also working on implementing adapted stoves projects in Uganda, East Timor and Myanmar.
8. Finally, what challenges and opportunities would you see in launching a country or region-wide energy efficient stove/kiln and sustainable biomass briquettes program?
The biggest challenge would be funding. The Congo is huge and such an operation would require funds and more than one organization to implement it. Mercy Corps is now implementing this program in four villages located in the areas where IDPs are returning home and the need for such stoves overwhelms our limited funds. The second challenge would be capacity. You need time to train staff to implement large programs and we operate in a very challenging emergency environment where it can be hard to recruit and keep good staff on board. I also don’t believe in growth just for the sake of growth. Yes, there is a real need but I also want to make sure that we can maintain the quality we seek to achieve and that we are having a real positive impact with the people who we serve here.
Stove Prototype for wood, briquettes and charcoal usage.
We wish to thank Elisha and Mercy Corps for taking the time to answer our questions!
Keep up the great work!
Elisha Moore-Delate (right) with members of the stove project
Kim
Photos are courtesy of Elisha Moore-Delate/ Mercy Corps
Photo of Elisha Moore-Delate (below) courtesy of Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps
