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.
What will it take?
What will it take to tip the scale in favor of a global crash program to swap out three-stones-and-a-pot for energy-efficient stoves, kilns, and sustainable alternative biofuels?
Port-au-Prince
Will Haiti be to bioenergy what Katrina was to climate change?
New Orleans
How long before Al Gore, Angelina, or Bono take on bionergy as the next big inconvenient truth? The Charcoal Project’s intelligence services tell us there is already a film in the works. Will Bono embrace the rocket stove onstage to his fan’s delight?
Perhaps it will be the lure of a multi-billion dollar global market in carbon offsets from stoves, kilns, and briquettes programs that will do the trick. Or maybe it will be the on-the-ground realities of implementing REDD that will undo the Gordian knot.
And the point is…?
Actually, there are four points and they boil down to this:
1. Is there a need for a global stove, kilns, biomass program?
2. Is the bionergy/biomass community ready to step up to the global challenge or will it cling to its small-scale, silo-ed, buckshot approach?
3. Is the world, especially the development community, ready to recognize and embrace the issue with the same furious passion it has correctly championed clean water, HIV/AIDS, climate change, malaria, and the eradication of polio, to name a few?
Getting the message across in Lagos
4. What will it take to move the world’s needle in the direction of a global effort to swap out three stones and a pot for better stoves, kilns, and fuels?
So?
Here’s what I think.
I response to the first question, my gut tells me there is a need but I’m not a scientist or development expert. I realize that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach in the way condoms, sex ed, and retrovirals come to mind when combating HIV/AIDS. Or the the mosquito net for malaria. This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer.
However, if the answer to the above is in the affirmative, then I am confident that practitioners and champions of bioenergy/biomass technology can rally around a unified goal. Whether you care about indoor air pollution, climate change, environmental degradation, or poverty alleviation, low-cost technological fixes and clean, sustainable biomass fuels exists to solve these overlapping global challenges. We might differ on how to get there exactly but I’m certain the likes of Hedon, PCIA, Aprovecho, Canada, Uganda, Brazil, Haiti, USAID, EPA, DOE, World Bank, UNEP, WHO, WFP, Berkeley U, MIT, and so many other organizations in so many countries can find enough common ground to rally around a shared vision. We have a choir, now all we need a hymn sheet, to answer question 2.
My answer to number 3 is an unequivocal yes. We know what the problems are and we have the technology to fix them. All this at a very low cost compared to, say, the financing of clean coal development or even a single nuclear power plant. When I explain the magnitude of the problem, its impact on half the world’s population, and the existence of readily available solutions, people I speak with invariably get excited about solving this problem. I’m certain you all get the same response wherever you are. In the words of Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a leading climate change scientist at the University of California San Diego, solving the charcoal/woodfuel problem is the “low hanging fruit” for climate change…. and, I would add, environmental degradation… and indoor air pollution… and energy poverty.
So what will it take? Three things: marketing/communications, lobbying, and resources. Launching global marketing and advocacy campaigns is not rocket stove science:
Nike ad in spanish
Marocco
"Yes. One dozen rocket stoves, please."
Nike, Coca Cola, IBM have managed global campaigns. As Tuyeni Mwampamba mentioned in our interview last month, there’s a real disconnect when the poorest of the poor can afford to have a cell phone (Nokia? Sony?) yet still use inefficient stoves and biomass. Maybe a free cell phone with every stove?
Perhaps Haiti will help us get the ball rolling. Either way, let this be a call to all in the bioenergy field to start thinking global, not just local.
I know not everyone will agree with our views on this but let the discussion begin and let’s hammer out a consensus because the stakes are high and the time to act is now.
Kim & Nina
The Charcoal Project
… 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
