[Stoves] Alternative to charcoal

Tue Apr 9 05:09:24 CDT 2013

Dear Paal

I fully agree with this approach. 

“If you change the wood from the forest with pelletized agriculture, forestry and milling waste and combustible waste from household, marked places, and industry, you save quite a lot of forest, and if the charcoal business with their decentralized infrastructure; change from charcoal to pellets and chopped waste wood, they will not lose their jobs. They will also create new jobs, which are extremely needed.”

If we do not offer viable alternatives – just theory and hand waving – we will find ourselves ignored. So what has been going so wrong for so long? I see two things. One is that improved stoves were not really improved, they just ‘tested better’ when calculated according to some formula. 

The other is that the customer was not considered to be correct. In fact the customer was widely insulted as not knowing what they were doing and they are responsible for wrecking the local environment and so on. Now that Western NGOs are jumping on the carbon trading gravy train we have a new way to beat people over the head about their behaviour, suggesting all sorts of ideas about carbon that would never be accepted in developed countries. One thing that does not change is that the outside people are trying to direct the recipient people what to do and what to use and how to use it. 

As usual African vote with their feet. If the product is not attractive enough to buy they don’t. If it can’t cook properly, they won’t use it even if it is given the them. I have seen an extraordinary situation recently where something like 45,000 subsidized stove were bought and not used. The deal was so good, they were bought as an investment for future sale when the subsidy falls away. That is amazing. It is also common sense. The expectation is that someone else will be interested in the product at a future time. It is a commodity investment!

The processing of fuels into high quality pellets worth buying is going to create millions of jobs in rural areas because that is where the resource is located. The management investment (not to mention money) involved to create a sustainable value chain is very large. The technologies are a bit early and to package energy at scale you need an electrical supply at scale. 

Making low density briquettes is one alternative. Maybe there will be invented something in between. There is a food called Tempe in Indonesia. It is made from soya beans which are cooked then cooled. Then chopped mushrooms are mixed into it and it is pressed together into a loaf. The mushrooms grow within the mix and it serves to bind the beans together. The result is a solid loaf of soya and mushroom which is sliced and fried.

If a briquette could be made in a similar manner it would be very useful from an energy input point of view. It could be held under pressure while some natural thing grows in it to hold it together. That is an in-between-technology that could work at scale.

There is still a lot of work to do.

Regards

Crispin

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