[Stoves] Fwd: [stove] 30 years went by quickly

Tue May 17 21:41:52 CDT 2016

Thanks Paul

Does this in some measure explain why Kirk has been saying for years that
solid fuels cannot ever be burned cleanly enough to be used for cooking?

It remains one of the strangest positions taken in the field of cooking
stoves. It was repeated in 1999 and many times since. It has been taken up,
with polite wording, by the GACC which frequently refers to ‘clean fuels and
clean cooking solutions for people who have traditionally been forced to use
solid fuels’ as if solid fuels are somehow inherently objectionable or
‘unclean’ (haram).

The implication, as early on taken by Kirk, is that solid fuels somehow
contain inherent emissions that cannot be done away with. Remember that
quotation about the ‘combustion efficiency of fuels’, by type? I think that
is the root idea behind ‘clean fuels’. There are ‘dirty fuels’ and ‘clean
fuels’ in that world of thinking.  There are also ‘clean stoves’ and ‘dirty
stoves’ I suppose.

Picture two testing teams operating two identical stoves with the same fuel
in adjacent rooms. The results are very good – extremely low emissions. One
team announces, “We have discovered a really clean fuel!”  In the next room
the other team announces, “We have discovered a really clean stove!”

Obviously we have a problem accepting either claim. Only a combination of
stove and fuel is clean, and even then, the way it is operated will still
have an influence. 

So what is the motivation for saying that solid fuels cannot be burned
cleanly enough to be used indoors? Why only liquid and gaseous fuels? I
reported earlier the remarkably clean burning pellet stove made by a tiny
workshop in Indonesia that has about ¼ of the PM emissions of an LPG stove.
Is an Albasia pellet a biomass fuel or a biofuel? I think that ‘bio’ means
‘living’ and that the pellets are the product of a living source – trees. In
the UK they have power stations burning biofuels (wood pellets). Maybe they
should be consulted.

I agree that the use of terms passes through fashion and whim, and it is
correct that the biofuels industry wants to be considered separately from
everything else. It is a way of hogging the subsidies, if nothing else, with
legislation requiring a certain amount of ‘biofuel capacity’ to be
developed, then restricting it in a way that excludes the obvious: wood and
agricultural waste pellets. Keeps the home fires burning for liquids, as it
were.

Recently I was sent a set of stove tests where the fuel burned was money –
literally. Money pellets! That’s a pretty good idea, right? Instead of
burning old money in a kiln, it is pelleted and sold as fuel. If it is
really expensive, does it qualify as a biofuel in need of a subsidy, or is
it plain old biomass?

Paul, I would say that this stoves listserve, and in no small part your
efforts to promote gasifiers, produced some of the cleanest burning stove
products ever seen.  As we know, bioethanol, bioparaffin, biodiesel,
bio-plant oils, biomethanol – all can be burned cleanly under certain
conditions, meaning they are not always seen to be doing that, but they can.
I hold that the same is true for virtually all solid fuels. First they are
rendered into liquids or directly to gases, then the gases are burned. All
fires are gas fires. 

If we start using ‘biofuels’ only for non-solid energy carriers, are we not
defeating the cause of clean combustion of wood and plant-based fuels?
Wouldn’t that make it easier than it is now to demonise wood the way the
West has demonised coal, still widely (and badly) burned in the East? 

I ask that because the campaign against solid fuels is so unreasonable, so
unscientific. Rather than rejoicing at the discovery of new technologies and
techniques that turn easily packaged solid fuels into combustible and clean
burning gas, we observe repeated references to solid fuels being ‘not clean
enough’, or even ‘will never be clean enough’ to be used for domestic
energy. 

There is a new move afoot to develop another generation of coal burning
stoves in Asia, possibly two. Testing recently (since the beginning of this
year) at the BST Lab at CAU, we have seen a number of stoves that ‘go
negative’ for a considerably portion of the burn time. Not as good as the
best Mongolian stoves mind you, but pretty good. Refinement will improve
these further.

By ‘negative’ I mean they not only produce no PM2.5 part of the time, but
they clean the air of background particles so their net impact is negative,
presuming there is something in the background to remove. Thus I predict
that within two years we will have coal burning and wood pellet burning
stoves that are overall, negative for PM2.5 emissions during the whole burn
including ignition, provided there is a WHO acceptable 50 micrograms of
background PM2.5 available to clean from the combustion air.

I think that is a pretty big accomplishment and it will owe a lot to this
assemblage of stove enthusiasts when it happens.  If the term ‘biofuels’
turns out to be used as a tool for demonising solid fuels, I think we should
push back, citing examples of solid fuel combustors that match or even
outperform liquid and gas burners.

Regards

Crispin

Stovers,

The message below from Kirk Smith's Stove List (Not StoveS, and not a
ListSERV where there is discussion) is interesting reading.  

He is totally correct that in America ( and probably Europe and elsewhere)
the term "Biofuels" does NOT include dry biomass.  

American politicians refer to "renewable energy" as solar, wind and
biofuels.   They NEVER mention wood and other dry biomass for renewable
energy.   But so much of our energy needs is for thermal energy, even water
heating at below boiling point.

Paul

Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu <mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu> 
Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website:  www.drtlud.com <http://www.drtlud.com> 

-------- Forwarded Message -------- 

Subject: 

[stove] 30 years went by quickly

Date: 

Thu, 12 May 2016 14:27:40 -0700

From: 

Reply-To: 

To: 

“~30th Anniversary Edition” of Biofuels, Air Pollution and Health.  

Nearly 3 decades after publication of the first and still, I believe, only
book laying out the major issues around what we now call household air
pollution, it is available for free download in pdf – see below and on my
website.   It began to address most all of the issues we still struggle with
except, perhaps, the climate angle, which I am coming to think in any case
is a bit of a red herring even though we also introduced the concept of what
is now called “co-benefits” and made the first measurements related to
cookfuel/stoves in the early 1990s.    Unfortunately, however, unthinking
application of climate concerns now operates as a deterrent in some quarters
to embracing truly clean cookfuel alternatives that have so much benefit to
offer the very poorest populations.

Note, I have long stopped using the term “biofuels” to mean biomass fuels,
since biofuels now have come to mean liquid and gaseous fuels made from
biomass in most of the world’s literature and media.  Continued use of
“biofuel” by some in our community now serves to confuse things I am afraid:
biomass fuel is a perfectly reasonable term and nicely parallel to fossil
fuel, but most importantly we cannot fight the now widely accepted use of
the term “biofuel”, which describes fuels with  entirely different
characteristics/k

Modern Perspectives in Energy <http://link.springer.com/bookseries/6313> ,
(originally published by Plenum, which was purchased by) Springer 

1987, Biofuels, Air Pollution, and Health: A Global Review, Kirk R. Smith

ISBN: 978-1-4612-8231-0 (Print) 978-1-4613-0891-1 (Online) 

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4613-0891-1”

Kirk R. Smith, MPH, PhD  <mailto:krksmith at berkeley.edu>
<krksmith at berkeley.edu>

Professor of Global Environmental Heath

Chair, Graduate Group in Environmental Health Sciences

Director, Global Health and Environment Program

School of Public Health

747 University Hall

University of California 

Berkeley, CA 94720-7360

510-643-0793 (fax: 642-5810)

http://www.kirkrsmith.org/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20160517/df2083c5/attachment.html>