The Charcoal Project

This post comes to us via the good people at the IAP (Indoor Air Pollution Updates). We thought it might be of interest to our visitors as a resource.

Peace Corps – Improved Stoves and Ovens – Welcome to the Peace Corps Clean Indoor Air/ Improved Cooking Toolkit, your one-stop source for reliable and relevant information about improved cookstoves, ovens and biogas applications appropriate for Volunteer communities.

Africa's ubiquitous "jiko" stove

Nairobi, Kenya (Xinhua) – July 9, 2010

A recent report compiled by the Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey reveals that a staggering 76.4 percent of households in the country’s rural population, rely predominantly on firewood and charcoal for cooking and heating the homes.

These households still cook using the traditional three-stone open fire hearths, which require huge loads of fire woods to function.

Apart from the wanton destruction of the forest cover, these energy sources also contribute significant pollutants harmful to the environment.

Alarmed by the building up disaster, the Kenyan government and some stakeholders have embarked on a project to mitigate the challenge.

The project, named Promotion of Private Sector Development in Agriculture (PSDA), is designed to disseminate energy saving technologies, geared to improve rural livelihoods.

Speaking to Xinhua in a recent interview on the measures the government has embarked on, Nancy Nguru, the project’s cluster manager for Central Kenya, explained that the core objective is to provide environmental-friendly technologies to improve cooking facilities, reduce fuel intake and pollution.

The first step will be the provision of user friendly technologies to develop energy saving stoves (jikos) for use in ordinary households, hotels and institutions.

The project, she told Xinhua, will be implemented by empowering people in the communities with knowledge, technology and skills on energy saving stoves making process. (Read more)

In a meeting this week with the folks from Acumen Fund, we were asked what was holding up the large-scale deployment of improved cookstove worldwide?

After all, at 2.5 to 3 billion people, the market for clean technology and sustainable alternative biomass briquettes is huge and set to grow. And the technology is pretty much there, too, compared to, say, carbon capture or designing a car battery that last more than a few hundred miles.

Plus, the advantages delivered by clean burning stoves add up to substantial savings and benefits to households, society, and the planet, which is probably why they call improved cookstoves the “low-hanging fruit” for carbon emissions reduction/indoor air pollution/poverty alleviation/and ecosystem-services-and-biodiversity-protection.

Acumen says they’ve been looking at investing in cookstove projects for years but they can’t make them work from their “patient capital” investment perspective.

So what’s the holdup?

The truth is there is no simple answer.

For one, the chicken-and-egg situation seems to apply: lack of adequate capital investment in manufactured stove companies and products keep unit prices too high to prime the demand pump. (Yes, even if the stoves are inexpensively manufactured in China.) Add to that shipping and import duties and the price rockets from, say, $10/unit FOB to $20 or more.

This means that tariff barriers on clean cookstove technology must be eliminated in favor of strong national and international policies supporting manufacturing and deployment.

Many, including us, have argued that securing funding from carbon credits sold from cookstove projects around the world is vital to sustaining and growing their deployment. But consider the challenge of selling carbon credits generated by improved cookstove offsets in the absence of efficiency and emissions standards, as Aprovecho’s Dean Still pointed out to us in a recent interview. 

What’s more, uncertainty about the future of the carbon credit market does little to inspire investments that depend on the sale of carbon offsets from cookstove projects. It’s nice to make projections when Certified Emissions Reduction (CERs) credits sell for almost $30 (Dec.2008) but things don’t look as attractive when they’re worth only $15 (today).

Social marketing is another important factor. Just because the stove cuts down on emissions and smoke doesn’t mean people will rush out to buy it. Cell phones are different. Buying and using a cell phone is cheap compared to getting a land line in a developing country. Plus, there are no viable alternatives to personal telecoms, whereas three-stones + a pot + cow patties = tried and true technology.

Add to the mix a well-intentioned but disorganized stoving community, a handful of international development agencies with their own agendas, and no shared script among stakeholders and the prospects of large-scale deployment of improved cookstoves starts receding even more.

Through the twitter transom today came the beginning of the answer. It arrived from McKinsey & Co. via the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (@aspenande.) The McKinsey article, by Raj Kumar, titled Social Enterprise: It Takes A Network, is definitely worth a read.

Here’s the essence:

“…how can social enterprises maximize their impact without having to achieve the financial scale that would make them major players in whole sectors of the economy? The answer lies in networks. Where one social enterprise may be limited in the impact it can have, a network of social enterprises can create opportunities for substantial financial scale and impact.

Those social enterprises that focus on the most difficult markets, often through bottom-of-the-pyramid business models, can use networks to share technology, jointly produce goods and services that meet tough environmental and social standards, and purchase fair-trade inputs as a group—effectively getting the value of a larger enterprise while remaining a focused social enterprise. This can help individual social enterprises to compete against bigger businesses that have lower cost structures due to economies of scale.

Social enterprises can also use networks to educate consumers and set market standards. Where meeting high environmental and labor standards may entail greater costs for social enterprises, through networks these groups can work together to educate consumers about the difference between their products and those offered (possibly at lower prices) by other businesses. In the United Kingdom, the Social Enterprise Mark is a brand used to identify social businesses so that consumers who want to support social and environmental goals know which products and services to favor. The mark also connects these social businesses to each other and to social-enterprise networks throughout the country.

Finally, networks can also be effective in lobbying government and regulatory agencies to create a social enterprise-friendly business environment. The business and NGO communities use networks (often called trade associations in these cases) for precisely this reason, influencing tax policies and regulations that benefit their form of organization. Social enterprises, given their relative small size, will have to work together if they hope to sway government to support them as a group distinct from traditional for-profit and non-profit enterprises.

“… those who wish to scale social impact would do well to focus on supporting robust networks—essentially the infrastructure of the social-enterprise industry—in addition to individual social entrepreneurs. In time, the social-enterprise community may find that measuring scale and impact at the network level (rather than at the level of the individual enterprise) is a more accurate measure of the true scale of social change and a better way for investors to gauge the return on their social investment.”

Whatever your thoughts are about taking directions from large management consulting services used to serving multinational corporations, there are good ideas worth considering in this free advice.

This is why on our to-do list for tomorrow is fortifying the network of global stakeholders who share the goal of making improved cookstove technology and better fuels more easily available to our world’s energy poor.

A note from the editor:

We were thrilled to learn this morning that BioLite, the company behind the stove featured in today’s post, won the Sustainable Brands Innovation Open held last night (10 June, 2010) in Monterey, California. The annual event is an “early stage business competition focused on connecting the existing global brands and socially responsible investor communities to the most innovative new product and service solutions being brought to market by today’s social and eco-entrepreneurs.” We hope the recognition bestowed upon BioLite will draw investor interest for this innovative product. Way to go, BioLite!

Read an online article by FastCompany about the SB Innovation Open and BioLite.

The BioLite cookstove

Will the BioLite stove become the iPod of cookstoves?

From a marketing perspective, improved cookstoves could benefit from Apple’s amazing ability to turn a utilitarian device, like a mobile phone, into a aspirational lifestyle must-have, like the iPhone.

Unlike China and India, Africa probably does not make the cut for Apple’s priority markets, but that’s not to say Africans are immune to aspirational marketing strategies. In fact, now that a third of the sub-Saharan population owns a cell phone, companies like Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, and Ericsson are probably quite pleased with their performance across the continent.

Now, if only we could figure out a way to combine the allure of sexy technology with the utilitarian nature of energy-efficient cookstoves.

Well, guess what, folks, this may have finally happened!

Hello, world.

The US-based BioLite company has produced a stove that integrates the killer app: a tiny, built-in electric generator that can charge cell phones and other small electronic devices. Which means this feature has the potential to turn the BioLite cookstove into the must-have appliance for every urban households burning biomass anywhere in the world.

The BioLite cookstove is actually a hybrid of two technologies. On one side is the thermo-electric co-generator developed by the company founders. On the other is the improved rockestove built by the StoveTec company, a branch of non-profit Aprovecho Research Center, which has been building and testing stoves for decades. (Read our feature on Aprovecho.) The Biolite stove was tested and perfect at the Aprovecho labs in the fall of 2009.

The idea is as simple as it is revolutionary. Take a basic rocket stove, attach a cigarette-pack-size thermoelectric generator to the side, and, voila, you now have a handsome, very-well performing improved cookstove that charges your cell phone while significantly reducing fuel consumption, carbon monoxide, and smoke emissions! For the many urban households in Africa that own cell phones but don’t have access to electricity, the BioLite stove would appear to fulfill a critical need.

See a video of the cookstove in action.

The nuts and bolts are easier to crack than Apple’s latest iPhone.

The stove’s chasis is a modified rocket stove that burns regular wood sticks through its side-feed port. The fired-up stove powers a side-mounted fan that forces air into the combustion chamber while also generating 1 – 2 watts, enough juice to charge a cell phone, mp3 player, or LED rechargeable lamp during a normal day’s cooking.

Stove charging cell phone

To Gassify or not gassify? For Alec Drummond, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of BioLite, the answer is clear. “It’s come to everyone’s realization that the future of cookstoves must be forced air gassification because you just can’t get the emissions down enough with out it.”

The stove can also be modified to generate between 5 – 10 watts, which means a cook can listen to the radio while preparing the stew. How cool is that?

Making the stove affordable will obviously play a major role in its large-scale adoption. The target price per unit is about $20 says Jonathan Ceder, BioLite’s CEO and Founder. What the final price turns out to be to consumers will largely depend on transportation and duties. And, yes, BioLite is looking for investors.

Here’s the skinny from BioLite’s company literature, which has chosen to downplay the stove’s electricity-generating capability and focus on its high efficiency and low emissions, instead.

Previous Efforts: A number of companies, including, Philips, BP, Envirofi t and StoveTec, have attempted to address this need (reduced emissions, increase fuel efficiency) with improved cook stoves. The resulting products can be grouped into two main categories, “rocket stoves” and “gassifier stoves”. Both groups of stoves reduce fuel use by 25-50%. Rocket stoves have shown strong field acceptance due to their low cost and simple side-loading operation but only achieve a 50% smoke reduction. By contrast, gassifier stoves are able to provide greater than 90% smoke reductions by adding fans to promote complete combustion. However these stoves require external electricity supply, necessitate additional fuel preparation, tedious top loading, and are substantially more expensive due to complex construction.

The BioLite Solution: The BioLite stove resolves nearly all shortcomings of the current generation of cook stoves, offering unparalleled smoke reductions in an affordable, user friendly design. Leveraging our patent-pending thermoelectric fan technology, the BioLite stove achieves a 95% smoke reduction without reliance on external power sources. Unlike previous gassifier stoves,
our design uses unprepared, side-fed sticks offering users a simple, well-adapted interaction similar to the rocket stove. Perhaps most importantly, the BioLite stove is affordable. Simplifications in the design allow the stove to be manufactured at nearly half the cost competitive ultra-clean stoves.

Co-Benefits: Our thermoelectric technology also provides an opportunity to deliver a small amount of electricity to off-grid consumers for LED lighting, cell phone charging or other electronic devices. This unique capability provides immediate value to both female users and male purchasers, augmenting long term returns from fuel savings and improved health.

As implementers of stove project know, getting households to overcome cultural barriers to adopt new improved cookstoves hasn’t always been easy. Telling people that a stove burns cleaner and uses less fuel is not always enough to get them to change habits.

“Someone in the market for a stove may not necessarily care all that much about how the stove performs in terms of emissions and consumption. But if there’s this little added feature that can charge a little light, or a radio, or cell phone, then it becomes a more attractive stove,” says Drummond.

Working with a Indian partner, BioLite plans to make the stove available to expecting mothers as part of a pre-natal care program.

The stove has also been deployed at Project Surya in the Sultanpur District in India’s Uttar Pradesh state.  This village has close to 300 households and most of the inhabitants live below the poverty line. Project Surya aims to mitigate the regional impacts of global warming by immediately and demonstrably reducing atmospheric concentrations of black carbon, methane, and ozone. Project Surya will replace the highly polluting cookstoves traditionally employed in rural areas with clean-cooking technologies.

In the end, however, the thermoelectric generator may just be the right incentive to get cooks to want to use a better stove. Nice job BioLite!

“Time to come together to make smart decisions about cookstoves.”  — Dean Still, Aprovecho Research Center.

Of all the improved cookstoves currently in use around the world, the rocket stove is probably the best known and perhaps the most imitated. And with good reason, too. A well-designed and well-built rocket stove can cut fuel consumption and emissions in half, sometimes more, depending on the fuel and combustion type. The stove, which can be modified to burn wood, charcoal, and briquettes, has been adapted to prepare the traditional meals of many cultures: injera bread in Ethiopia, tortillas in Guatemala, and, nan bread in India. You wouldn’t be wrong to think of the rocket stove as the Swiss Army knife of improved cookstoves.

If imitation is indeed the most sincere form of flattery, then you’d think the stove’s creators would be thrilled about its success.

“It’s been a real eye opener,” Dean Still tells us over the phone.

Still heads the Aprovecho Research Center, a sort of Manhattan Project for stove testing and design in Oregon where the stove was first designed and built back in the 80s.

Clarifying his statement, Still says he doesn’t object to others imitating the stove. In fact, as a humanitarian, he’d like to see the stove deployed everywhere it’s needed across the world. The problem arises when the stove is poorly copied, which happens too often. The technology is not complex but a deviation of one centimeter can have major effects on the stove’s performance. Using inferior quality material can reduce the stoves life expectancy to just a few months.

The result can be a stove that underperforms and falls short of expectations among end users and investors, which, in the case of many stove projects, is usually an international development agency or a non-profit.

“We want stoves that meet minimum standards so that people and donors can be assured that when they invest in a stove solution, they know what they’re getting.”

Lack of standards may also be the reason why less than 10 million stoves were deployed in 2009, according to the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air. The figure is woefully below the 177 million units that the WHO says must be distributed to cut in half the number of people without access to improved stoves worldwide.

Still has devoted the last quarter century to developing stoves for the world’s poor and you can tell he is wading waist deep in the wreckage of bad stove concepts, poor execution, and unfulfilled performance expectations.

Granted, he says, there have been many success along the way. But the downside of failed projects is a donor community that has grown skeptical of stove projects that overpromised and under-delivered solutions to reduce mortality from indoor air pollution-induced, alleviate poverty, and protect the environment.

This time it’s different

Yet despite the collective roller-coaster for the stoving community, Still thinks this time it may be different. One reason the tide may be turning is Climate Change. That’s because a growing number of scientists have identified black carbon (BC), a major byproduct of inefficient biomass combustion, as an important contributor in Climate Change.

Black carbon in soot is the dominant man-made absorber of solar radiation in the atmosphere. It is approximately 1 million times stronger than CO2 per mass unit of mass – and contributes to the warming of the atmosphere at the global level. Black carbon also warms the atmosphere by absorbing thermal infrared radiation from the ground and within clouds. Furthermore, because it directly heats surfaces on which it is deposited and changes surface albedo (surface reflectivity), black carbon is a major contributor to the accelerated melting of Arctic sea and land ice, glaciers and seasonal snow covers.

The upshot is that black carbon has a much shorter average atmospheric life time than CO2 and other GHGs (on the order of days to weeks for black carbon versus years to centuries for most GHGs). Recent studies identify black carbon as the second- or third-largest overall contributor to current human-driven global warming, surpassed only by carbon dioxide and possibly methane. A disproportionate share of the disease burden associated with black carbon sources is borne by women and young children who spend a larger share of their time indoors and are thus subjected to higher exposures.

Beyond the link between cookstoves and Climate Change, a lengthy New Yorker article published last year that prominently featured Aprovecho’s work was the clearest sign yet that the stove movement — and the problems it seeks to address — are finally gaining public attention.

The January earthquake in Haiti has also drawn much attention to the link between energy poverty, unsustainable biomass use, environmental degradation, and humanitarian disasters.

Compared to reducing atmospheric CO2, cutting BC emissions may prove to be a quicker and less expensive solution for reducing climate change.  According to a recent USAID study, of all the intervention methods available to cut BC by heavy emitters like India and China – ranging from retrofitting polluting diesel engines, two-stroke engines, and switching to CNG to power vehicles – swapping inefficient cookstoves and improving biomass fuels provide the highest mitigation cost effectiveness as measured in $/tCO2eq.

The 40,000 feet perspective on standards.

Few institutions outside Aprovecho have the breadth of experience developing and testing cookstove technologies. After more than three decades developing and improving them, one thing is clear, says Still, “there is not one cookstove solution, there are many, depending on their use.” One of the main differences is a stove’s fuel consumption and emissions performance. This is why coming up with benchmarks and standards for fuel consumption and emissions is an urgent mission for the stoving community, says Still, who points to the good work being done in this area by groups like PCIA, the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air.

Standards for cookstoves do exist, nonetheless. Some of them have been developed by Aprovecho as an important measure of a stove’s performance. These benchmarks, like the Water Boiling Test (WBT), are used to evaluate a stove’s performance while completing a basic task. In the case of the WBT, a stove is made to “simulate” meal preparation by boiling five liters of water and simmering it for 45 minutes. The test is designed to measure the stove’s heat transfer and combustion efficiency, which are then measured against a benchmark.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: Aprovecho and Shell Foundation, a longtime player in the indoor air pollution abatement field, have proposed benchmark for fuel use, Carbon Monoxide (CO) and Particulate Matter (PM) emission. These benchmarks are designed to complement the WBT. The PCIA is leading the charge on benchmarks.]

While easy, quick, and inexpensive, the WBT only measures one aspect of the stove’s technical performance, not necessarily what the stove can achieve in real households under real conditions.  A Controlled Cooking Test and a Kitchen Performance Test have been developed to provide more practical testing results.

But before the stoving community can develop the perfect universal test for determining a stove’s performance, it must first answer a fundamental question, which is, what’s more important, reducing fuel consumption or reducing black carbon and other noxious emissions.

The answer is, of course, both, but designing a stove that meets the highest current ratings in emissions reduction and energy consumption at a reasonable cost has so far proven elusive. Coming up with the right standards will be critical to getting cookstove projects to scale, especially since carbon-credit financing will be vital for some projects to make financial sense.

In a way, the future of cookstove adoption worldwide may very well depend on getting the cookstove standards right.

“If you want to reduce fuel use, then you can make a stove that does that for not a whole lot of money, Still says. But if you want to reduce emissions, then the stove is going to cost a bit more. Probably more than individual families can afford to pay, which means it will have to be subsidized one way or another. This also means governments will need to make this a priority because the cost of a low emission stove may be above a market driven price.”

Keeping both eyes on the ball

When I ask Still if he ever tires of the geologic pace at which things move in the development world, the petty infighting within a chronically underfunded movement, and the frustration of laboring in a field that has yet to gain the notoriety of more high-profile causes like the HIV-AIDS, or malaria eradication, he answers simply, “no.”

“This is about real people, women and children, dying for lack of access to a simple fix,” he says.

“The real face of this is when you go to Guatemala, like I did last year with Dr. Kirk Smith. You walk into these little villages. It’s beautiful outside. They sky is blue. They have their little plot of corn. You walk into a house and there are six kids, and three of them are coughing their guts out, and one of them has such accute pneumonia that you have to rush the child to the hospital.  The family is too poor. The wife has six kids, and she has to work the farm, and so she is condemned by poverty to watch her kids die. And that’s because of the carbon monoxide and the damn smoke.”

So what will it take to get move this issue higher on the development agenda?

The math and the science have not been there to show how serious the problem is. The donors want to make sure that their money is well spent. They say, “I’ve got malaria, HIV, and you say there’s a problem but you can’t prove it? You say that a stove is going to help, but, you say you can’t prove that either?”

The good news is that big steps are underway that should help solidify the case for energy efficiency cooking technology and improved fuels.

One important step is the imminent publication of a decade-long study that will help make the case for energy efficient and emissions-reducing stoves. The study, by Dr. Kirk Smith of UC Berkeley, is expected to make the definitive case that eliminating indoor air smoke should be an urgent public health priority.

Additionally, India recently launched a national program that is designed to put millions of improved cookstoves in the hands of the energy poor. A project on this scale should yield valuable practical experience.

Finally, several large conservation organizations are exploring the feasibility of launching  national biomass energy efficiency programs across the entire supply chain of countries where biodiversity is under serious threat. The idea is to make stove projects replicable around the globe.

And, on an editorial note, The Charcoal Project is partnering with a university to jointly carry out a global cost-benefit analysis study that would show the true social and environmental cost of continuing to burn biomass under a business-as-usual scenario.

So, what now, Dean?

We have been manufacturing stoves that cut fuel use and emissions in half. But now the health and climate change communities want us to make stoves that have the same fuel use but also reduce emissions by say 90%. This means we have to be very rational now and make good decisions, because the bar has been raised for very good reasons.

And that’s why, my brother, we have a lab. That’s why we have to be understated, not overstated. Most importantly, we have to be together, pull together, and not exaggerate. We have to make a new generation of great stoves that are also loved by cooks, that make great food while protecting both cooks and our fragile planet.

Watch a video of Aprovecho’s rocket stove: