Improved Biomass Cooking Stoves

Doug Barnes, at the World Bank June, 2010

There are 3 billion people in developing countries that rely on solid fuels for almost all of their cooking. The question can be asked how many of these over 800 million households cook with an improved stove? The answer comes from a new study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Like any good mystery story you will have to skip to the end for the answer. All I will say is that the results may surprise you.

Doug Barnes Complete Article: Improved Stoves in Developing Countries by the Numbers

The statistics in Doug Barnes' article are drawn primarily from this WHO United Nations report, which has some Great Information about Biomass Energy use and the Health Impacts of that use.

The "Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries - A Review focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa" report draws attention to the energy access situation beyond the conventional focus on electricity, especially in poorer developing countries where access is the most constrained.

Main topics covered by the report include:

• Energy access situation in LDCs and Sub-Saharan Africa, including access to electricity and modern fuels
• Fuels and improved stoves used for cooking in developing countries
• Health impacts attributable to indoor air pollution from household use of solid fuels for cooking and heating
• Developing countries with modern energy access targets, and
• An analysis of different energy access scenarios for 2015, to estimate the progress in energy access that will be needed for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

Some Key Points from the report

Access to modern energy services is still low in developing countries and
this lack of access disproportionately affects Least Developed Countries (LDC)s and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)

• Three billion people, i.e. almost half of humanity, rely on solid fuels –traditional biomass and coal – as the available modern energy services fail to meet their needs. More than 80% of people in LDCs and SSA primarily rely on solid fuels, compared to 56% of those in developing countries as a whole.
• Two million deaths per annum are associated with the burning of solid fuels indoors in unventilated kitchens. Children bear 44 percent of this toll, and among adults women bear 60 percent of the burden.
• Almost a quarter of the world’s population still lives in darkness; over 80% of them in South Asia and SSA. More than 70% of people in LDCs and SSA lack access to electricity, compared to28% of those in developing countries as a whole.

Lee Hite, June, 2010

Measured Drawings are on his site: http://home.fuse.net/engineering/ewb_project.htm

As an alternative to the large compound lever briquette press, here is a small version (Micro Compound Lever Press) that will generate the same or more pressure to make a high quality briquette, is made from wood with hand tools and can produce briquettes at a rate of about 12 in 10 minutes. This would work well in a single family setting, as a classroom demonstration tool, or for any application requiring simplicity and a small footprint.

See demonstration for this press and two others at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt0QQe6Eetw

See measured drawing at http://home.fuse.net/engineering/ewb_project.htm

Marc Pare, June, 2010

Three friends and I spent last semester at Georgia Tech working on the thermodynamic modeling (and optimization) of cook stoves... I attached a summary of our project and the meat of the analysis section and the Full Report (see the attachments)


TOWARD END-TO-END IMPROVED COOK STOVE OPTIMIZATION
By Marc-Antoine Paré, Matt Redmond, Christopher Beebe, and Nick Kretschmar

While it is possible to build and test the performance of prototype Improved Cook
Stoves without significant capital investment, if the amount of time that it takes to
optimize candidate stove designs could be drastically reduced, then cook stove
technology could reach the hands of many more in developing nations. It was identified
that an end-to-end modeling and optimization effort for Improved Cook Stove (ICS)
design could aid in the development of more efficient and cleaner-burning stoves. The
thermodynamic and heat transfer processes underlying cook stove performance are
tightly coupled, which makes modeling a challenge. The following analysis is a first
attempt at capturing each of the underlying processes of stove performance. The model is
formulated so as to facilitate the optimization of stove geometry. This effort helps
pinpoint the deficiencies of the current state of stove modeling and attempts to
demonstrate the eventual power of a predictive stove model.

Ken Goyer discussing Uganda, Darfur and Stove projects

Dear friends,
We shouldn't lose sight of why we are making stoves and for whom
we are making stoves. The ultimate TEST of the stove is whether or not
it is accepted and used. The woman must be able and willing to use the
stove. The best stove in the world will go for naught if it is
rejected by the consumer. One half of the people in the world live in
cities. They don't go out and cut their own fuel. Their fuel is offered
to them in the marketplace. Most people are unimaginably poor, and at
their wits end. Fuel is chosen because it is expedient. Many places
lack industrialization and infrastructure such as transportation. Even
in the country, people need to burn what they can find and often don't
have much choice. It seems to me that a woman who hauls fuel on her
head, sometimes for miles, would prefer to maximize it's use rather than
haul the charcoal back to her fields. What we can do is to present
choices. But if these choices are to see fruition, we need to think
through the whole equation. How much does it cost? Is it practical?
Will it help? As well as "is the combustion and heat transfer in my
stove better than the combustion and heat transfer in your stove?"
Let's remember that the customer is always right (whether they are
paying or not), and they have the final vote :-).
Best regards, Ken Goyer

from Ken's Message The Ultimate Stove Test http://listserv.repp.org/pipermail/stoves_listserv.repp.org/2007-October...

See some of his Many projects and contributions

Art Donnelly, SeaChar.Org June, 2010

It was not quite 9 months ago, when I sent out an email to a small group of collaborators, with a Subject line that asked the question: "How do we get biochar stoves to Central America?" Of course, like the punch line to the old vaudeville joke, the answer is "lots of hard work". I could not have imagined 9 months ago was how rewarding all that work would feel. I want to share that feeling with all of you.

I recently returned to Seattle from Costa Rica's famed coffee producing area the Santos Zone. This was my second trip since mid- January. I have been continuing my work as a technical consultant to a clean stove/biochar project. Proyecto Estufa Finca (Farm Stove) was initiated by organic coffee farmer Arturo Segura http://www.solcolibri.com/ and the members of the local citizens group APORTES.

Jock Gill, May 2010

With one can: I can make a stove I can cook a meal I can make biochar I can be carbon negative I can start to change the world

This iCan is made from a 7" tall pineapple juice can

I took a 7" tall pineapple juice can, removed the contents, and then marked it thusly:

1. A line around the can 1/3 from the bottom --- this is the top of the fuel load

2. A line around the can 1/3 from the top -- this is the line for the secondary air holes

The middle section is for the wood gas buffer to insure pyrolysis, not combustion.

Next

Primary air supply for a 7" tall pineapple juice can

Marked the bottom of the can off into 8 equal sections. I then used a nail set to make 8 equally spaced holes about half way between the outside of the can and its center. I made a 9th hole in the center. Not too big -- about 1/2 way down the small nail set shaft.

Then I used the line1/3 down from the top to locate the secondary air holes.
I made 8 equally spaced holes with the small nail punch and then used the the biggest punch to enlarge the holes to the full width of its shaft.

At this point I removed the top of the can completely. I left it on for the best structural integrity while I was punching holes.

Done. The All-in-One TLUD is complete. Very simple. Just 17 holes in the right places in one can.

More pictures, are also available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jockgill/sets/72157624142002304/
and click here for more story details: http://www.bioenergylists.org/node/2827

DONALD KEVILUS , May, 2010

DONALD KEVILUS has uploaded a video of his . well, I guess I can call it a titanium micro-Vesto. It is too small to be a 'mini'!

There is a video of Don at

Yvonne Vögeli May, 2010

For those of you interested in the ARTI biogas system, please have a look at our new report on "Anaerobic Digestion of Canteen Waste at a Secondary School in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania".

After the evaluation of the ARTI system on household level, this follow-up study evaluates the suitability of the same technology applied on a bigger scale. You will find the detailed results on our website in the
"Africa"-section:
http://www.eawag.ch/organisation/abteilungen/sandec/schwerpunkte/swm/projects/anaerobic_digestion

C. Venkataraman, A.D. Sagar, G. Habib, N. Lam, K.R. Smith, May, 2010

Article in Press in Energy for Sustainable Development:
Venkataraman C, et al, The Indian National Initiative for Advanced Biomass Cookstoves: The benefits of clean combustion, Energy for Sustainable Development (2010), doi:10.1016/j.esd.2010.04.005

Abstract:
India has recently launched the National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative (NCI) to develop next-generation cleaner biomass cookstoves and deploy them to all Indian households that currently use traditional cookstoves. The initiative has set itself the lofty aimof providing energy service comparable to clean sources such as LPG but using the same solid biomass fuels commonly used today. Such a clean energy option for the estimated 160 million Indian households nowcooking with inefficient and polluting biomass and coal cookstoves could yield enormous gains in health and welfare for the weakest and most vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, cleaner household cooking energy through substitution by advanced-combustion biomass stoves (or other options such as clean fuels) can nearly eliminate the several important products of incomplete combustion that come from today's practices and are important outdoor and greenhouse pollutants. Using national surveys, published literature and assessments, and measurements of cookstove performance solely from India, we find that about 570,000 premature deaths in poor women and children and over 4% of India's estimated greenhouse emissions could be avoided if such an initiative were in place today. These avoided emissions currently would be worth more than US$1 billion on the international carbon market. In addition, about one-third of India's black carbon emissions can be reduced alongwith a range of other health- and climate-active pollutants that affect regional air quality and climate. Although current advanced biomass stoves show substantial emissions reductions over traditional stoves, there is still additional improvement needed to reach LPG-like emission levels.We recognize that the technology development and deployment challenges tomeetNCI goals of this scale are formidable and a forthcoming companion paper focuses on what programdesign elements might best be able to overcome these challenges.

Nathaniel Mulcahy May, 2010

Nat Mulcahy and the World Stove Haiti project was nicely profiled on the web site The Charcoal Project. Read the full article A Man, a Stove, a Mission

From the Charcoal Project article:
"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."

The World Stove has also been profiled (by Kelpie Wilson) on the Huffington Post, read WorldStove: Transforming Haiti and the World

And there are some great videos on YouTube, including this one: