[Stoves] News: World Bank blog on eradicating household air pollution

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

>World Bank is not proposing LPG for heating stoves in Kyrgyzstan.

That’s for sure. They are proposing to localise the production of stoves developed in Tajikistan at Caritas Switzerland in Muminabod.

>Yes, there is a fake, ideological, cultural war in the name of premature mortality by solid fuels. The gas and electric industries may seem to benefit, but people aren't rushing to buy gas or electricity to save their lives but because they are convenient and versatile.

So if the other solid, liquid and gas-fueled stoves deliver the same or superior service, they will be preferred. I have no problem with that.

>Lomborg too thinks air pollution kills 7 million people a year and says says "Providing 1.4 billion people with such improved stoves would save almost 450,000 lives a year and avoid almost 2.5 billion days of illness annually."

I suspect Herr Lomborg is mistaken. If it were true, then people living in the highest levels of PM2.5 air pollution would live the shortest lives. Looking at life expectancy in various countries, this is not the supportable conclusion.

>That said, the blog is very carefully written, including the last sentence - "eventually there will need to be a switch from solid fuels to LPG or electricity."

Which is to say crafty. Perhaps they should consider some practical and inexpensive alternatives, one of which is space heating using a coiled pipe under heaped biomass. It works in a Canadian winter.

>…Making and burning "combustion gases" is probably key to making clean enough, usable, marketable stoves using solid fuels, direct or processed.

That was the topic of a presentation this afternoon on how to pyrolyse coal and run the gases through a hot coke bed to be thermally cracked before they get to the combustion chamber.  One of the comments we repeatedly get is, ‘That looks exactly like a gas fire.’ Well, all fires are gas fires.

Regards
Crispin

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