Burn Better, Cook Faster, Save $$: The Quest for an Efficient African Cookstove

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... In Africa, the overwhelming use is cookstoves, and for a generation now, companies and organizations have been handing out LPG or ethanol cookstoves trying to move Africa to a new energy source for cooking. There’s been limited success.

Peter Scott has been working in Africa in the cookstove field for 20 years, and tells the tale.

The market is for solids. Ethanol hasn’t scaled, and the supply chain for LPG isn’t there, and LPG fuels cost 2-3 times as much anyway, and is not economical for the traditional meals that have to be cooked for a long time, it’s more popular with the breakfast meal, for boiling tea.

I came to Africa in 1990 at the age of 20 and I worked in the Congo. Since 1997 I’ve been working in cookstove design, and I’ve been a consultant to USAID and Practical Action. I spent years trying to stop the use of traditional cookstoves. But finally I started my own operation in 2011, because there was this gaping need to develop a fuel efficient cookstove where we can stop the bleeding while we develop other fuels.

Harry Stokes and his GAIA Foundation have labored tirelessly in the field over the years and have moved a lot of units. Femi Oye had an organization selling a rival ethanol gel cookstove. POET has been active as a foundation activity, and Novozymes was backing a venture for a number of years which did not come off well in the end.

It’s a replacement market. 98% of the customers are switching from the older type of charcoal to ours, and there’s not always the money available to make the investment, even with the quick ROI and the health benefit that comes from reducing the amount of charcoal that’s being burned.

The cookstove market is crowded, that’s the perception. But look at solar there are like 140 companies working in East Africa in that field, while there are only 3 cookstove companies that are players at all.

The value proposition for prospective players is simple, and the market is wide, but the technology hurdle is not without drama.

You have to deal with solid fuel, and it’s not going to be standardized what they use. It’s high temperature, there’s going to be 1000C in there, so you need materials that can withstand the heat. You need clean emissions, and you need to get the price point which is around $30, you need durability, and you need something that works in everyday life, not just in the lab, and you need to test that for a year to understand how your alloy choices, for example, will change the overall picture.

Cutting the energy usage by half doesn’t solve all the problems of urbanization in Africa. If it takes 8 pounds of charcoal to make a pound of charcoal and you get twice the energy of wood — the urban shift is still powering a 4X increase in wood demand, and Africa can’t sustain that. Cutting that in half doesn’t, of itself, solve the problem, But, as Scott points out, it buys time for other energy options to emerge. And cuts emissions.

Gathering firewood may the most dangerous occupation ever handed out to small children. The more biomass that’s used, the farther afield they are going to scour for it. Farther from home means closer to trouble — and violence against young girls is on the rise in Africa, and collecting firewood is a driver. We’ve noted these trends in highlighting the push to use alternatives like liquid ethanol or ethanol gels — and all those benefits apply, and alcohol fuels represent a tremendous opportunity.

But for those seeking a low-cost, traditional solution — that is, the everyday African looking to save money not learn a new drill for cooking family meals — efficient cookstoves provide a real opportunity to make a better world — and governments might take a pause from all the programming aimed at getting people to stop using cookstoves, and simply improve them while the next generation of energy technology is in development or the infrastructure of new energy supply is being deployed. READ MORE