[Stoves] LPG import in India

Andrew Heggie aj.heggie at gmail.com
Wed Jan 3 16:07:08 CST 2018


On 3 January 2018 at 18:38, Law, Steven (MOECC) <Steven.Law at ontario.ca> wrote:

> Now this data is relevant to commercial and industrial boilers, not cook stoves, so there may be some challenges with "extrapolation" down to a very small scale but in general BaP is typically considered a surrogate for poor combustion and is often correlated with carbon monoxide.

Yes my feeling was that good secondary combustion prevents the
formation of benzo[a]pyrene but your graph and mention of a
correlation with CO  is also what was said in the recent EPA webinar
we discussed. In fact it was said many of the things we measure were
similarly related, like CO, pm2.5, black carbon and other  PICs as
well as methane which could be used as they all had a similar
correlation.

They did also mention about 20 other PAHs and oxy PAHs as well as
benzo[a}pyrene. One of the things we are aware of on stoves is the
wish to substitute "cleaner" fuels for biomass, which I have nothing
against, but it still leaves many people without access to better
cooking methods to use biomass. What we need to get a handle on is
that we know that we cannot get as low in pollutants in the home as
LPG or electricity but think we can get good enough. Defining the best
as zero pollutants doesn't give us what is an acceptably clean cooking
 method.

You will note from the more "political" discussion that Nikhil is
saying that arbitrary  application of pm2.5 emissions from all sources
have been wrongly used to attribute premature deaths to indoor air
quality. My take is that pm2.5 (and possibly ultra fine particulates
from woodburning are likely to be amongst the worst types of
particulates and PAHs adsorbed onto them potentially more mutagenic
over a longer period because of the way they are absorbed into body
tissues.

To my mind its a bit like russian roulette the longer you play the
game the chance of getting a bullet increases even though the chance
is only small on each occasion.

Andrew




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