[Stoves] Another attack on solid fuels by public health adventurers

Sun May 21 18:23:26 CDT 2017

Dear Friends

In case there be any doubt as to the nature of the war on solid fuels, here is a street-legal extract from the paper mentioned below:

“Though the reasons underlying [use of solid fuels] are complex, it has been shown to be highly associated with poverty and the lack of access to clean fuels. Access to clean fuels is difficult to address, given that individuals may not have the financial resources to buy Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) or electricity, even when available in their communities. For this reason, most solutions proposed in poor areas have been focused on “making the available clean” (i.e. to burn biomass cleanly in improved biomass stoves), rather than on “making the clean available” (Smith and Sagar, 2014). On account of a better combustion, improved biomass stoves have higher efficiencies a lower emissions of kitchen smoke, while still relying on solid fuels that are accessible and generally free. These new improved biomass stoves vary enormously, but none have yet been shown to sufficiently reduce exposure to PM2.5 to comply
with the WHO's Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality (Smith and Sagar, 2014). Research on exposure-response shows that the use of LPG leads to concentrations of PM2.5 below the critical level of 10 μg per m3, whereas concentrations measurements in homes with improved biomass stoves have shown an annual average of 170 μg per m3 (Johnson and Chiang, 2015; WHO, 2014b). Even the Philips stove, the most advanced biomass stove in the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC) catalogue, reduces PM2.5 concentration by only 66% (Muralidharan et al., 2015). This highlights the importance of ensuring access to clean fuels and not just improving the combustion and efficiency of biomass stoves. In LAC 90 million people”

There are a lot of things worthy of comment in this one paragraph.
For a start:
“PM2.5 below the critical level of 10 μg per m3 ”

What? 10 μg per m3 is so extraordinarily low that no one will meet it. If it is true that we are all doomed to expire for breathing air containing generic PM2.5 above that level, we can give up now.

Who says the Philips stove is the most advanced? Reduced what by 66%? Exposure? Against what baseline? In who’s kitchen? The GACC’s ‘stove catalogue’ rates performance based on the WBT which contains so many conceptual and calculation errors that it renders all test results irrelevant! How may times must that conversation be held? Simply correcting the major calculation errors in the WBT moves the stoves around the chart dramatically. If Berkeley can’t do math and the GACC won’t fix it, we should simply move on to some rating method that reflects reality. The entire stove community cannot continue to be held hostage to incompetence that happens to serve select groups.

The statement that people use solid fuels because of a lack of access to ‘clean fuels’ assumes that solid fuels are ‘unclean’, haram, unwanted, untouchable: Dalit fuels. There are numerous cases where liquid and gaseous fuels are available and shunned in favour of solid fuels. The reason is often economic, but that does not mean ‘poverty’. Just economy.

LPG is not acceptable to some people, even whole regions. It is logistically unacceptable in many regions, and we do not exist to give subsidies to Big Gas. Biogas, wood gas and coal gas are perfectly viable alternatives to LPG which is expensive. The industry that supplies it is highly tied up with a very small number of distributors. It would cut millions of jobs out of energy industries were it to become ‘required’.

“Making the available clean” is obviously the sensible path to take. The paragraph proposes, in toto, that solid fuels cannot be burned cleanly, and further, that liquid and gas fuels can, and are, and are safe doing so (this is all about protecting the public, right?). Note the confabulation of indoor air quality and unvented stoves with chimney stoves and outdoor air. This technique, or trick if you must, tries to give the reader the idea that because a stove that emits all its smoke indoors, it cannot be made clean enough with a chimney to produce an outdoor PM2.5 level that is acceptable. Key to this untruth is the claim that stoves with chimney cannot be clean burning (no technological improvement is possible) and that they leak so much smoke from the stove that the IAQ problem will persist at least in a modeled fraction of kitchens that is above some arbitrary level.

If you did not follow this last point, have a look at how the WHO’s exposure model works. The estimate that there are really good and bad kitchens and stoves and the model is set up to always estimate that some combination of bad kitchens and stoves exist, therefore there will always be ‘failing’ combinations. These may not exist at all, but they exist in the Monte Carlo Simulations so by gum they probably exist in real life.

To always have some kitchen-stove combinations fail, they heroically assume that an average 25% of the emissions leak from chimney stoves, and that there are no clean burning fires in all stoves fitted with chimneys. Because it is so obvious that a reasonably clean burning stove with a reasonable chimney such as is found throughout Asia would leak basically zero smoke into the room (while burning a solid fuel) some excuse has to be invented not to do the obvious. I say obvious because millions, or billions of people across Asia and North America already figured this out and put chimneys on their heating and cooking stoves. This invention apparently didn’t reach California.

“These new improved biomass stoves vary enormously, but none have yet been shown to sufficiently reduce exposure to PM2.5 to comply with the WHO's Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality (Smith and Sagar, 2014).”

Finally some relief, thanks to Fresh Air (Netherlands), Dr Talant Sooronbaev and the World Bank’s Kyrgyzstan heating stove pilot programme. Together they definitively showed that solid fuel stoves can be locally made and installed by local contractors and supplied with local fuels and operated by local people and that the exposure to PM2.5 can be reduced from a 24 hr level of 200-800 µg/m3 to 10-40. (There is a range because even walking through the house with boots on can raise the level to 100 for a few minutes. A lot of cooking creates an exposure well over 40 so we have to be at least a little realistic about what constitutes a ‘health protective’ level.)

Good, then. It is settled. The claim that solid fuels are not being able to be burned cleanly enough to protect health is definitely disproven.

The starting and finishing positions of this paper needs to be corrected in light of the clear evidence contradicting them.

Regards
Crispin
.

Available for free for a few days more. LPG fuel subsidies in Latin America and the use of solid fuels to cook<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517302719>, Karin Troncoso, forthcoming in Energy Policy Volume 107, August 2017, Pages 188–196

"This study analyzes the relation between fuel subsidies to LPG and solid fuel use."

Without mentioning LPG price or a subsidy. Where the price of a cylinder is mentioned, the size of the cylinder is not mentioned. And when expenditure on fuelwood is mentioned, the volume/weight of the purchase is not mentioned.

It's cite-o-logy galore, peppering platitudes by throwing in some names and dates at the end, as if that shows any proof of validity of the assertion.

Any purpose to this?

Simple. The Quixotic war against solid fuels.

Public health (profession) can be a risk factor for solid fuel use.

Take this sentence "India opted for a voluntary program called “give it up” that asks middle class LPG consumers to give up their LPG fuel subsidy (US$16 per year), which is transferred to a poor family. As of April 2016, 10 million people had adhered to the program (The Economic Times, 2016<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517302719#bib41>)."

What utter baloney to say "10 million people had adhered to the program". GiveItUp and alleged transfer of the subsidy to a poor family is a gimmick. Most of those "given up" subsidies were fictitious or not utilized in the first place, but our Modi government is as good at cooking up numbers as WHO and if $16 a year or less than one US penny a day per capita is the  LPG price subsidy in India, there are a few billion dollars somewhere in the gutters of Indian cities.

Lesson: Skip the whole paper. I am collecting gratitude at the rate of $1.90 per capita per day.

DOES ANY BODY CARE

Nikhil

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Nikhil Desai
(India +91) 909 995 2080
Skype: nikhildesai888
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