[Stoves] Fwd: from K Smith [stove] Smoked out: Coal and health

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Paul

 

I just got this message from Cecil Cook who has been working on the World
Bank clean stove initiative (CSI) in Indonesia.

 

“About half of the biomass burned during certain seasons of the year come
from the fields: corns stalks, tobacco stalks, and pepper bushes.”

 

Consider that the combustion of tobacco stalks is going to give a very
different smoke profile than teak or pepper bushes or corn stover.

 

1.      The item correctly names coal burning stoves as a problem.   But I
will anticipate Crispin's rely by saying that I agree with Crispin that
there are not bad fuels, just bad stoves.   And that the breakthroughs about
improved coal burning stoves are just starting to become known and they need
further research.  



Improved coal stoves producer far fewer condensed volatile particles. This
is so obvious that we can actually demonstrate it with the first filter that
is used to get the gas samples clean down to 1 micron. A viscous sticky mass
coats the filters. We can wash it off using paint thinners and when dried on
a surface, it is honey-link, sticky gunk. The far cleaner cross draft and
TLUD stoves are able to run the whole test without making a detectable
difference to the 1 micron filter.


2.  Remember, there are many different types of coal, so look for successful
clean burning for a specific stove with a specific type of coal, and
celebrate and advocate that success, rather than dwell upon the
NON-successes of other stoves with other types of coal.  



Improved coal stoves obviously need fuel that is ‘burnable’ meaning there
are issues related to the coal contents in some places, not others. While
there is often a knee-jerk complaint about ‘coal contains mercury’ there is
mercury in all soil, so we expect it in coal. The major source of airborne
mercury is the oceans and in the atmosphere there are completely unknown
mercury cycles that on occasion remove it entirely from swaths of the
atmosphere as is shown at the monitoring station at Cape Point, South Africa
(referred to previously). Mongolian coals have very little mercury and the
highly polluted city air has unusually low mercury levels.  The popular
Nalaikh coal has uranium in it and after combusting, the ash could even be
processed to recover it economically. The coal, not, but the ash, yes. I
asked about this last week.


4.  Crispin has experience with coal burning stoves in Mongolia.   Some are
TLUDs.   Claims are that some are quite clean burning.   GETTING THIS
INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO ALL OF US SHOULD BE ONE OF THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVES
OF THE GACC AND ACESS.  

 

You have to be careful about this. The City of Ulaanbaatar is testing stoves
but they own the results of the tests and they are not releasing them. They
are used to rate the performance of stoves as acceptable or unacceptable for
subsidy. We have no right to this information on a per-manufacturer,
per-model basis. You could of course do your own tests.  You can judge from
the criteria (referenced earlier) that the improvement over the baseline is
profound and the difference in the city air quality was measurable in the
first year of partial replacement of the stoves (about ½ or less). 

 

Something to consider is that if coal burning produced no particles, would
objections to burning it on a domestic basis wane? I think not.  There is
too much inertia in the anti-coal movement, particularly from pro-natural
gas people. There is a lot of money at stake.  The result is that the
efforts to provide much cleaner solutions for the millions of people who
depend on coal to stay alive will remain on a back burner or will be done
out of the mainstream, as it has been to date.

 

Something worth noting is that if the improved coal stoves in Ulaanbaatar
were plotted on the ‘stove inventory’ chart they would all be in the bottom
left corner of Tier 4, well below all of the biomass stoves on the chart.

 

In the lab last week we were noticing our own comments on the PM
measurements of the best stoves. We no longer talk about the stoves
producing zero PM2.5 – that is now a ‘given’. We are commenting on the
ability of the stove to scrub the ambient PM out of the air – whether the
stove can remove it completely or not. Let me say that again: Some stoves
are, some of the time literally cleaning 100% of the PM2.5 out of the
ambient air and emitting gases that are better than HEPA-filter-clean while
burning wet lignite. Some cross draft stove can do it continuously, once
hot.

 

That such technologies are not included in the stove inventory, deliberately
omitted because the fuel is coal, is stunning.

 

Regards
Crispin

 

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