[Stoves] HEDON Newsletter (30/11/2011)

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at gmail.com
Thu Dec 1 11:35:46 CST 2011


Dear Vetle

>Does anyone have any thoughts of how the charcoal business will react when
more efficient or other fuel -consumption stoves are available in urban
areas.

>I guess some people will always lose economical  in the end. producer,
transporter, distributor or consumer?

>any known project including this issue?

The excellent description of the energy source and use given by Paal the
other day and the similar post more or less addressed to me two weeks ago
(which I have not had time to answer yet) describes the principle
opportunity: the energy exists in some form, and it is sufficient to meet
present needs. 

The challenge is to deliver that energy in the forms wanted by people who
are going to make use of the resource. Clearly the Peko Pe type stove is one
option for at least a portion of those needs.

One of the difficulties faced by people living in rural areas is generating
enough cash to buy things they cannot make for themselves including matches,
candles, buckets, batteries, shoes, soap, school books and things like
cement and window panes. Just about everyone wants to get some cash for
these basic necessities. Charcoal is one of the most reliable things they
can produce with zero investment. It is a knowledge product though not
usually described as such. Yes it uses biomass, but that is considered to be
a community resource in nearly all places and “what belongs to everyone can
belong to me.” It’s free. 

Our market research into attitudes towards wood stoves in an urban
environment found that people perceive wood to be a ‘free fuel’ even when
they are paying for it. That was unexpected. It will be difficult in say,
Zambia, to change the attitude that wood is free as long as they are not
paying for it, and even if they are, the attitude will be that it ought to
be free for quite a long time.

There are three sets of people financially affected by the charcoal industry
(excluding the end users): the producers, the transporters and the
re-sellers (there are usually two levels of reselling). Many vendors in
Maputo contract with a transporter to move what they buy in the field. The
transporter is not a charcoal owner, just a transporter with a price per km.
They do not mind what they transport. This may not be the case in all
markets but it is common.

If you switch to wood or non-woody biomass the total amount transported will
be greater (total tonnage). Looking at the macro-economics, there will be
more transport involved because biomass contains about ½ the energy per ton
(compared with charcoal). Whatever is going on in the city, the transport
cost of the energy supply will double. So the relevant question is, what is
the transport value or the transport % of the fuel’s cost at the delivery
end? If the transport is 60% of the retail price, the impact is pretty
strong.

Transport 60, charcoal 40 = 100. Double transport: 120, charcoal 40 = 160
which is a 60% rise in cost to the end user for energy.

In order for energy costs not to rise (and that means we are not talking
about a saving at all) the device that uses the biomass stove must deliver a
fuel saving compared with the charcoal-using stove. Remember that there are
improved charcoal stoves and that is the proper baseline if one is talking
about fuel switching, not stove improving.

To date I have not seen any paper that discusses the impact of a large scale
fuel switch and some comparison between the performance of the TLUD-type
stoves and the improved charcoal stoves. It is quite legitimate to ask what
the cost effect on the city will be if the fuel was changed. Because the
questions have not been answered (at all, as far as I can tell) the impact
remains unknown.

At this time the best sure-win is to promote the TLUD-type stoves and others
that burn a variety of biomass to those with easy access to the fuel(s) and
a low income. Cecil Cook found that the people most likely to have problems
buying fuel are those recently arrived from the rural areas, often driven
there by poverty, death in the family, lack of opportunity at home and any
of a host of other reasons. They are more likely to scrounge fuel (wood).
They also tend to live at the periphery, at the peri-urban peri-rural
interface. They have at least some direct access to the biomass.

The other group with immediate potential is of course rural families who can
use the plentiful resource. A question is, will they prefer to do that and
then turn the wood they used to harvest into charcoal to raise some cash? If
the cost of getting biomass to the urban customers, or if those customers
refuse to deal with the product, the urban charcoal market will persist and
probably grow. This strategy is not a crazy one. Fuel switch where the
resource is plentiful and sell the savings into a transport-efficient cash
economy in the form of efficiently produced charcoal.

Producing charcoal efficiently and reducing losses in the system would
release a huge amount of biomass (raw resources) at the producer end of the
chain. What should be done with that fuel? Should it be left to rot? It
might be 50% of the current consumption so it is a huge amount of material.

An alternative strategy is this: improve production of charcoal 30% and use
only inputs that are not needed locally (local to the producer who has
switched to a bulk biomass burner). Improve the charcoal stoves in the urban
area by 30%. That results in a 30% drop in consumption by the cook, a 30%
saving on fuel cost, a similar drop in transport traffic, and a 60% drop in
the off-take of trees/branches (combination of 30% more production per ton
and 30% less demand). That leads to only a 30% drop in income for the
producer.

If the producers absolutely need the cash income, how will they respond?
Will they lower the price and  produce more to compensate? Will they live on
less? Can they? Although Paal’s macro view of the energy supply is valid,
like AD Karve’s, individual responses to a loss of income will lead to
unexpected consequences.

Regards

Crispin

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