[Stoves] Fwd: [stove] 30 years went by quickly
Roger Samson
rogerenroute at yahoo.ca
Wed May 18 15:03:18 CDT 2016
Hi Crispin, Paul and all
Its unfortunate but the reality is the household cookstove movement is being driven by the "clean indoor air" agenda. Whatever happened to bottom up development, working with people to determine what their household cooking needs are? When our agency installs a low cost, locally built, cleaner burning REAP clay brick BIOMASS stove in West Africa even the men' face light up because they see the benefit of the technology for their families. Our clay brick stove uses less fuelwood, more fuel types, burns cleaner and is faster to cook. Its a major household energy system upgrade for that family. The sad part is that the stove doesn't meet the standard of the clean indoor air folks who are disconnected from the reality of poverty.
Its just painful to watch the stove sector obsess over indoor air quality and put the lions share of the resources available on that issue. I think there should be push back. Biomass is going to remain the main fuel source (especially in rural areas) until all all other more important development priorities are met like hunger, health care, housing, schooling and clothing. In the LDC's its just complete nonsense to think they are moving to liquid biofuels, gas or electricity any time soon in rural areas.
All those stove policy makers should spend a week in a rural household to understand how disconnected they are from the problem. We need appropriate solutions for the diverse household cooking needs and to make incremental progress. The great leap forward is just not going to happen. It didn't work very well for Chairman Mao and its not working for the stoves community.
regards
Roger Samson
--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 5/17/16, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Fwd: [stove] 30 years went by quickly
To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Received: Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 10:41 PM
#yiv6113175303
#yiv6113175303 --
_filtered #yiv6113175303 {panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;}
_filtered #yiv6113175303 {font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15
5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;}
_filtered #yiv6113175303 {font-family:Consolas;panose-1:2
11 6 9 2 2 4 3 2 4;}
_filtered #yiv6113175303 {panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;}
#yiv6113175303
#yiv6113175303 p.yiv6113175303MsoNormal, #yiv6113175303
li.yiv6113175303MsoNormal, #yiv6113175303
div.yiv6113175303MsoNormal
{margin:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:11.0pt;color:black;}
#yiv6113175303 a:link, #yiv6113175303
span.yiv6113175303MsoHyperlink
{color:blue;text-decoration:underline;}
#yiv6113175303 a:visited, #yiv6113175303
span.yiv6113175303MsoHyperlinkFollowed
{color:purple;text-decoration:underline;}
#yiv6113175303 pre
{margin:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:10.0pt;color:black;}
#yiv6113175303 span.yiv6113175303HTMLPreformattedChar
{font-family:Consolas;color:black;}
#yiv6113175303 span.yiv6113175303EmailStyle19
{color:windowtext;}
#yiv6113175303 span.yiv6113175303EmailStyle20
{color:#1F497D;}
#yiv6113175303 .yiv6113175303MsoChpDefault
{font-size:10.0pt;}
_filtered #yiv6113175303 {margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt
72.0pt;}
#yiv6113175303 div.yiv6113175303WordSection1
{}
#yiv6113175303 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.
RegardsCrispin
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, PhDEmail: psanders at ilstu.eduSkype:
paultlud Phone: +1-309-452-7072Website:
www.drtlud.com
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [stove] 30 years went by
quicklyDate: Thu, 12 May 2016 14:27:40
-0700From: 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, (originally published by Plenum,
which was purchased by) Springer 1987, Biofuels, Air Pollution,
and Health: A Global
Review, Kirk R. SmithISBN: 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 <krksmith at berkeley.edu>Professor of Global
Environmental HeathChair, Graduate Group in
Environmental Health SciencesDirector, Global Health and
Environment ProgramSchool of Public Health747 University HallUniversity of California
Berkeley, CA
94720-7360510-643-0793
(fax: 642-5810)http://www.kirkrsmith.org/
-----Inline Attachment Follows-----
_______________________________________________
Stoves mailing list
to Send a Message to the list, use the email
address
stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your
List Settings use the web page
http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org
for more Biomass Cooking
Stoves, News and Information see our web site:
http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
More information about the Stoves
mailing list