[Stoves] GACC Stove Summit is LIVE NOW Thurs

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Ron

 

>This is mostly to ask for more data.   

 

OK

>>…LPG is the most expensive…

            [RWL1:   Nothing like this was stated or implied during the webcast.  Can you provide some cites?



Cites of what? Is anything contested about this? LPG is a compressed gas sold at a pressure above 4 bars which requires that all aspects of its containment and sale (tanks, hoses etc) meet national or international standards and in the case of tanks (all the large ones) inspection every year by a qualified pressure vessel inspector.

 

South Africa has 28 National standards dealing only with LPG stoves and fuels and distribution equipment. 

            [RWL1a:   Anything there that should impact the future of what this list should be discussing?  Any specific cite?

 

I don’t think so. If you want to go into LPG stoves and fuel supply, bring money. It is not a game for the small player. 

 

‎Greenhouse gases from charcoal making? Seriously? Is that what caused the 0.001 degree rise in the average global temperature over the past 18 years and one month? We should perhaps recall that wood literally grows on trees and is made of 90% CO2 (on a mass basis). Unharvested, unused wood rots to methane. What is the comparative GHG number?

            [RWL3:   a)  Are you denying the Kirk Smith claim on char-making providing a lot of (unnecessary) GHGs?   A cite?

 

I am not sure what you are after here. I know you to be provocative so I will assume there is nothing behind these questions. The fact is that Water vapour and CO2 and methane are GHG’s. Do you need a citation for that?

 

                        b)  The .001 degree needs a cite.  

I think you can look at the GISS temperature chart at woodfortrees.org. I am sure you are aware of the issue of the lack of an increase in the average global temperature in the past 18 years. It has been talked about since at least 2005.  CO2 goes up, temperature doesn’t. Why? James Hansen promised it would.

 

Focussing on 18 years air surface temperature for only one of a dozen different energy imbalance measures is not very helpful.  

 

Well let’s look at that. What do you mean by ‘helpful’? You mean the inconvenient truth is that CO2 goes up (a lot) and temperature doesn’t is ‘off message’? I am not ‘focussing on 18 years’ I am stating a fact. The global temperature trend, starting now and looking back until the trend is non-zero, comes to 18 years and one month. This is hardly controversial.

 

I see something almost every day on 2014 likely having the highest global temperature in the last 100-150 years.  

 

And why not?  It is a fact – the temperature has been rising at a rate of 0.6 degrees per century for about 200 years. The longest period without any rise has been the last 18. This is likely to undermine the value of stove program CO2 offset trading credits, do you agree? The CO2 sensitivity is not what it was assumed to be. I am sure you are aware that the estimated temperature rise for a doubling of CO2 concentration was almost cut in half by the IPCC in February this year. That cut the value of CO2 offsets in half. 

 

Focussing on the ‘highest global temperatures in 150 years’ is not helpful. The temperature 800 years ago was significantly above what it is now. Focussing on the resons why would by helpful.

 

                        c)  The issue about making char in the field is mostly one of illegality - generally not re-planting.  Are you arguing that present char production is sustainable on average?

 

Charcoal production varies in sustainability from place to place. Where is it illegal, generally speaking, it is unsustainable. Where it is legal and regulated, like South Africa, Swaziland, Rwanda and Haiti, it tends to be sustainable. It used to be sustainable in Chad before it was made illegal. Now it isn’t.

 

                        d)   Don’t understand your last question on “comparative GHG number.  Can you rephrase?

 

What is it you don’t understand? See the comment above: water vapour, CO2 and methane are GHG’s. 


The old saw about 'fan stoves' was discussed here a couple of days ago…

            [RWL4:    I have heard this from more than Prof.  Smith.  I don’t recall this topic “a couple of days ago”.   Anyone able to give a specific cite?



Please see the archive here on fan stoves being the only clean way to burn biomass (Kirk says, and has said, for a number of years).

 

            b)   Being part of the “TLUD crowd”, I have to remind you that being able to sell the produced char is unique in the stove world.  

 

There is no need to remind me – I am on the look out for ways to turn that into a viable business. As you probably know I am not really a stoves person, but a microenterprise entrepreneur having created something like 15,000 work rural opportunities. I see selling charcoal as a great business opportunity. I doubt that it can be done by bringing wood to a city and making charcoal and selling it back to a rural community – we have discussed that before. I put numbers on it and challenged you to provide alternatives which you did not. It is unviable.  It may however work by taking agri-waste products and making something to sell. I assume it will work for rural Indonesia where sugar making (not cooking) is a major need for energy. In particular candle nut shells are strong enough when charred to ship a considerable distance.

 

Making money is more important than saving money for many of us.  

 

That’s possible. 

 

Using the char as biochar rather than selling it will make more sense for many (and is now being done in several char-making stove programs.

 

I think you will have to show the business case for biochar. Lloyd Helferty is working hard on that in Ontario.

 

            You are perhaps saying that biomass for stoves is in perpetual short supply.  

 

I said nothing of the sort. The UNFCCC however has a predisposition that a lot of biomass is ‘unsustainably harvested’. This is not the case in Indonesia virtually everywhere. There are rules for determining whether or not harvesting is sustainable. 

 

Not true if we start planting instead of stealing feedstock.  The world will be a much better place with a big effort at reforestation.  On can have (must have) both increased stock and increased flows.

 

This is easily accomplished on paper and quite difficult to achieve in practice in Africa. The issue is the ownership of land. Otherwise known as land rights. People will not protect land over which they have no control and from which they derive benefit at no cost. See “tragedy of the commons” in the UK.


>>‎The improved stove sector is being taken over by the LPG and electricity sector. It will involve massive, beyond imagination loans to poor countries for infrastructure and it hinges on saving a claimed 4+ million ‘premature deaths' per year.

            [RWL6:   This is key.  This is the subject of my next message.  I am not yet ready to agree on “taken over” 

 

Well, watch this space I guess. The ANSI team at the ISO meeting fought very hard to prevent the name of the Standard not to be changed from Clean Cookstoves and Clean Cooking Solutions, harder on that than anything else actually. Now we know why. They have a plan that goes far beyond improving biomass stoves. At the Guatemala meeting the issue of whether this was a biomass stoves standard (which it was clear most people thought they were working on) or ‘all domestic cooking stoves and all energy supplies’.  It was made perfectly clear by ANSI that they wanted to had a new international standard covering all cooking appliances, including electric induction heaters, hot places, LPG and so on. I am not sure they realised that there are already hundreds of regulations on these appliances. It cause quite a stir in the WG’s.

 

or “behind imagination loans”.  But yes the rationale is all on saved lives.  We on this list have not been making the needed case for not  being “taken over.”

 

I warned a few weeks ago that there were forces much greater than the biomass stove interest group intent of using the cooking stove vehicle for their own purposes. I only received two (flippant) replies which may indicate the incapacity of this group to affect the future of their own ‘industry’.


>>How much investment will be required per life saved?  How does this compare with other opportunities to save lives? We will soon find out, I am sure. 

            [RWL7:   I am not aware that anyone has made this investment calculation.  

 

If they have not, that is shameful.  How can you spend hundreds of millions of $ without knowing what the payback is? It is akin to spending that sort of money using a test method that has never been reviewed to show that it is telling us what we want to know. As you know, this is particularly upsetting to me as I have had to witness the waste of so much effort by so many people who were sincere and expectant. 

 

I guess that the sellers of LPG should have little trouble finding the necessary funding - not needed from GACC.  Anyone know?  

 

The LPG vendors are not in a viable business situation outside certain particular locations and scale of sales. Outside that, they want subsidies. 

 

What I remember from the finance part of the discussions was that funding would be heading to stoves, not the ability to add more LPG.  I think LPG burners are quite inexpensive already - and not much need for R&D.  (True?)

 

It would be informative for anyone interested in LPG rollouts to look at Egypt, South Africa and Indonesia.  There are very particular circumstances in which it works without subsidy. For general use in a poor population, it is out of the question.

 

 The issue seems to be on cost and assuredness of supply.  But I need help here.  Anyone an expert on where the funding is apt to come from if LPG is really a major goal of any country?    

 

See above. LPG’s ‘last mile’ is not only the problem of getting a stove to the cook, it is the perpetual problem of getting the full tank the last mile, again and again. It is not legal to take an LPG cylinder in many forms of public transport. The idea that this is a substitute for improved wood stoves is misplaced.

 

The average wood-consuming stove user is apparently apt to have more than one stove now.  Having and using a wood-version isn’t going to stop even if LPG stoves are in 100% of all the world’s homes.  There is plenty of work for this list.

 

Well, we hope so, but it would not do us any good to support the meme that solid fuels are ‘inherently dirty’ and that LPG is the final solution. It is contradicted by the evidence. Why is this not known in the hallowed halls of Berkeley? Are they not keeping up?

 

            I am pretty sure that wood-consuming stove proponents will fail if they imply that saving any of the 4 Million lives is not worth the expense.  

 

I haven’t heard anyone say the expense is unwarranted. The question is, how much and how much benefit. One of the strangest aspects of this argument in favour of ‘non-solid fuel solutions’ is the assumption that stove emissions have to be vented into the room. In order to improve indoor air quality – add a chimney! Good grief why is this so difficult to imagine?  There are only a few places (very concentrated populations) where IAQ would not be greatly improved by chimneys alone. One does not need ‘a fan stove’ to dramatically reduce exposure to indoor PM.

 

I doubt many believe that a switch to 100% LPG (or electricity) is going to happen in the near term.  There remain plenty of things on this list to do.

 

Agreed. It will not happen soon because it would be a terrible waste of money compared with the other benefits that could be obtained for the same money spent on other health things. Chimneys are not expensive. Is that the problem? Too cheap? Too effective? Too easy?

 

We need a frank discussion about this. But not having invited to the table, who will present these options?

 

Regards

Crispin

 

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