[Stoves] News: Methanol cooking fuel for india...

Sun Dec 23 15:47:52 CST 2018

Dear Nikhil and Andrew

The % purity of ethanol has to do with the cost of purification. A standard industrial fractional distillation tower can produce 95% ethanol in one pass.

That's it. Anything above that needs a second or third pass, and less, is a waste of of processing heat, packaging and transport.

The combustion efficiency is used because it easy to measure and it is a safety issue. The idea that a fuel is "clean" but stove is not, has yet to sink in, in certain quarters.

Very few ethanol stoves have low CO, even though it is possible to burn it perfectly. The CleanCook Stove,  which is well known here, had dreadful emissions before it was brought to ETHOS. The CO was more than double what is permitted in South Africa or Germany. After testing it (probably for the first time ) on Stove lighting Sunday,  it was suggested that the perforated ring that serves as a pot support should be doubled.

Shortly after that, a search turned up an additional ring. It was placed on top of the original, and the pot put on top, now 40mm higher. The CO production dropped by a factor of four bringing it well inside the safe limit (as judged by DIN and SABS).

Look at the stove now, and you will see that modification first implemented at ETHOS is built into the current stove.

There is no excuse for an ethanol stove to be on the market without a proper test for CO, especially when the fuel has been dubbed "clean" , because obviously for anyone in this business, it is the stove that produces the emissions, not the fuel.

I have built maybe sixty different ethanol stove iterations and it is possible to burn that fuel with extraordinarily low emissions of "anything" other than CO2 and water vapour.

The same holds true for kerosene which has essentially the same elements in it. The repeated condemnation of kerosene as a "dirty fuel" is a scientific abomination and an attack on the poor.

Crispin
From: pienergy2008 at gmail.com
Sent: December 23, 2018 4:18 PM
To: crispinpigott at outlook.com
Reply to: ndesai at alum.mit.edu
Cc: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org; nariphaltan at gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Stoves] News: Methanol cooking fuel for india...

Crispin:

1. A simple answer to why the GoI doesn’t have a requirement for combustion efficiency - for the alcohols or solid biomass - might be that efficacy in use is impossible to regulate for small uses and small users. The theoretical rationales for efficiency or emission rates - to save forests or lives - belong in the grant-driven metaphysics of the pundit caste, not proven in real lives. What can’t be controlled shouldn’t be attempted.

2. “Clean Fuel” is a dirty business. Biomass-derived alcohols are called "clean" because they are presumptively "renewable energy" and presumptively "climate neutral". There is no evidence of renewability or climate neutrality; this is another instance of purported noble objectives justifying pretentious pursuits. If at all, land or forest clearance for large scale sugarcane farming places high demand on land prices and water, and waste management is a headache too. I am sure experiences vary, but from what I have seen and heard of the political economy of sugarcane, sugar, and sugar-based alcohol, this business seems to depend on slave-like labor of growers, even when they happen to own the land. (Anil can testify to the sugarcane politics and finance of India. I have known in East Africa. And then there is the history of imperial sugarcane business in the Caribbean and elsewhere.) If at all, once you move away from the physicists' beancounting of joules and carbon, sugarcane might be one of the most environmentally and socially destructive agricultural products.

3. About CO and water content: I have heard of anhydrous sugarcane ethanol - during a trip to a Malawi distillery. I don't know if production costs of a 5% water product are much higher than a 10% or 20% water at a large scale. However, it may well be that higher water content permits higher overall efficiency in cooking - if, as I am thinking, the cook varies the power level. (Varying power is why efficiency cannot be controlled in actual use, irrespective of CO production.) I am speculating here on the basis of some 50-years old memories of Bunsen burners in labs and different kinds of kerosene stoves at home.

BTW, what Malawi subsidies for water and ethanol? Never heard of it in my 30 odd years of looking at Malawi energy sector now and then. Electricity is the best cooking solution there as in much of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Nikhil

On Dec 23, 2018, at 9:44 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>> wrote:

Dear Anil

I found two things odd about the low concentration ethanol story and perhaps you can comment. Why low concentration? Was it easy to make? Or make without a distillation process? Or a good distillation process?

Ethanol is being tried in Madagascar maybe for the past five years. Kenya is in their sights. The local producers have no problem getting 85% concentration which is above the SANS requirement of 80%.

The energy content at 20% water is not great to begin with and when there is more of it the stove's cooking power becomes ever-more hopeless.  So the first question is why sell water as fuel in the first place?

There was a suspicious program in Malawi trying to sell water as a bonus in ethanol looking at the energy from reformation of H2O without mentioning the energy it subtracted to break it down. It got lots of subsidies.

Next is the expectation that ethanol is "a clean fuel". This silly talk has been going on for longer than most stove makers might realise. Some of the worst stoves are those thrown together in a garage burning ethanol or ethanol gel with attendant claims that because " the fuel is clean" the emissions are "safe".

Your story about the CO is not unusual at all. It is easy to create CO with ethanol. So my question is why the GOI doesn't have a performance requirement for combustion efficiency. It ethanol is that magical category of "clean fuels" that are acceptable no matter what the emissions are from the stove?

Thanks
Crispin
From: nariphaltan at gmail.com<mailto:nariphaltan at gmail.com>
Sent: December 22, 2018 9:06 PM
To: ndesai at alum.mit.edu<mailto:ndesai at alum.mit.edu>; stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Reply to: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] News: Methanol cooking fuel for india...

Stovers,

We pioneered in early 2000 the development of low concentration ethanol stove<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnariphaltan.org%2Fethstove.pdf&data=02%7C01%7C%7C2313eb6f8ec8416a3baf08d6691c2505%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636811966927375197&sdata=IhV4A3dI7xkrJtILaFeCzjycni7tg9dk7CKvCQAo3SY%3D&reserved=0>. However testing them in rural huts we found high amounts of CO emitted. This gave headaches to few hut dwellers. There is a propensity of higher CO emissions in ethanol/methanol fuels. They should be taken care of properly. Thus the combustion systems have to be better designed.

GOI in its stupidity is pushing all these things irrespective of their consequences. They are also pushing for ethanol production for cars from different biomass fuels. Stovers might like to read about a small essay that I wrote about it recently.
https://www.thebetterindia.com/167321/sugar-replacement-eco-friendly-ethanol-production-india/<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thebetterindia.com%2F167321%2Fsugar-replacement-eco-friendly-ethanol-production-india%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C2313eb6f8ec8416a3baf08d6691c2505%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636811966927375197&sdata=TQzFPF2epPr1QToO874cbMY76DZxMRcilPi%2BKsMh3VY%3D&reserved=0>

Cheers.

Anil

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