[Stoves] Kenya: To use or not to use fuelwood?

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

 Dear Ron

You wrote

I cannot recall ANY “numbers on paper” related to stoves, deforestation and biochar from Crispin.  Can anyone give me a specific cite?

How can you forget the multiple times we have discussed how agricultural area would take to transform to a 'char enhanced' condition, based on the centuries of concentrated work in Japan. I provided, twice, calculations based on current understanding, that showed it would take 2000-8000 years of biomass production on a hectare to convert that land to a char-enhanced state (so goes the claim for enhancement, supported in certain soils, with certain crops, at certain doses with char produced in a certain way from certain trees). You replied that the plants could be, in effect, dosed the way maize is dose fertilized.

I sent photos of experiments being conducted at the BST Lab greenhouse, actually inside the lab building. Looking closely at the labels I photographed them a couple of days ago. The doses were based on current understanding: 10 tons per ha and so on. ‎That is the source of the numbers 2-8 thousand years. The alternative, creating char on a large area and dosing an area 1000 times smaller is also possible, which is what is happening in Japan. 10-20 tons per ha seem to be the dose of choice.

I think it is fair to point out that many users of biochar are using it as a soak for water, and do not make claimed for the char per se. It could also be done with expanded vermiculite and has been for years. I am not comparing results I an repeating what I read.

The core claims of the article in Kenya are that cooking with wood causes changes to the climate which are listed, and that burning other fuels will not, or will reduce. The article makes several such claims. The claims are dramatic. No evidence is mentioned.

Your chosen position ‎is difficult. You want to support the idea that cooking with wood is bad for everyone, that cooking with pyrolyser biomass gas is not, that char helps agriculture in symbolic, that is to say, magical homeopathic quantities, that only char making stoves are 'tier four' on a scale we have, with Xaveir's and Faio's and Yixiang's assistance, conclusively proven has no basis in science as it is commonly accepted.

You are going to need more than luck with that. If you want everyone in rural Kenya to stop cutting trees for cooking and heating (some may not know there is a home heating need in some areas of Kenya) and to start cutting trees to use only the energy from pyrolysis gases, you had better start planting a heck of a lot more trees and increasing the heat transfer efficiency of stoves by a factor of three - another set of numbers I have provided in the past.

Lastly, just because charcoal trade is 'mostly illegal' does not make it unsustainable. Legality is a political choice. Sustainability is a matter of science.

You're welcome
Crispin

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