BIOMASS COOKSTOVES and OPEN FIRE COOKING
According to the International Energy Agency, 2.7 billion people lack access to clean cooking facilities, of which 1.9 billion are based in Asia, 657 million in Africa, and 85 million in Latin America. These people still depend on biomass as their main source of energy and are forced to burn wood, charcoal, crop waste, coal, kerosine, dung, grass, and even leaves for cooking, despite its known downsides.
The public health implications alone are profound: 2 million lives are lost to respiratory, heart disease and other soot-related harm every year, according to World Health Organization estimates. In 2019 more 500,000 of these deaths were infants and toddlers. Deaths could reach 2.5 million smoke related deaths soon because of the pandemic, restricting work, schooling, and outdoor activities. “Having an open biomass fire in your kitchen is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day according to studies by the World Health Organization (WHO) cause of the volume of biomass use.
Billions of people around the world are continuing to suffer from poor access to water, sanitation, and hygiene, according to a new report by UNICEF and the World Health Organization. Some 2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities. WOWZA!
So, consider that these open-fire and inefficient combustion cookstoves are also needed to disinfect water for consumption and for cleanliness, usages several times daily with biomass means a lot more pollution and deforestation in addition to cooking meals every day.
Africa, India, and Asia are Latin America are particularly vulnerable to deforestation from the use of wood in open-fire and inefficient biomass cookstoves for cooking & disinfecting water through boiling it.
Estimates show that for every dollar spent on reducing particulate matter pollution $12 would be avoided in health damage. Besides being healthier, it would eliminate much of the dangerous aerosols like black carbon as well as CO2 and other pollutants caused by biomass burning and deforestation.
Today, there are a small number of organizations UNICEF that use passive solar to disinfect tainted water putting it in PET bottles in villages. The bottles are normally spread out and piled up in central areas and with a small devise the size of a camera set up top of the pile to show when sterilization occurs, normally within 3-6 hours depending on direct heat from the sun. Then the word gets around for families to collect their purified water bottles. This is a win-win, minimal effort solution that saves lives and healthcare costs, and the water no longer needs to be boiled and more fuel wasted.
Unfortunately, the number of efficient cooking stoves and the availability of clean water sterilization is only available in at some areas and villages due to the size of the problem and financing available is just a couple of many types of aid that these organizations work hard to take on.
How much health damage to these 3 billion people could be directly from black carbon aerosols as well as reduced clean water availability and climate change. Can it even be calculated?
Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves gave this summary for Uganda. Uganda is a Less Developed Country which has made some progress in reducing poverty though large inequalities still exist. The country is politically stable and has recently discovered oil reserves.
Biomass accounts for 91% of total energy used in the country. Biomass use is at unsustainable levels. Wood and charcoal are becoming increasingly scarce and more expensive. 3.8 million households cook on open fires in an enclosed space and nearly 1 million additional households are exposed to carbon monoxide from traditional charcoal stoves.
Normally cooking chores most often fall to women, and children are typically at hand, they are the primary victims of smoke-related respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Exposure to biomass burning particles is also strongly associated with lung cancer, asthma, and low birth weights. The daily inhalation of smoke containing carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, benzene, sulfur, and arsenic amongst others, can be compared to smoking two packets of cigarettes every day, significantly increasing the risk for respiratory diseases.
Awareness of these risks among the general population is virtually non-existent, though government officials and NGOs have recently become aware of the health implications of existing cooking practices. A commercial market for improved stoves exists in the country but many stoves are of poor quality. Sale is a low margin business dominated by artisans, carbon developers, and ‘social ventures’ – there are few producers at scale.
Second, the inefficient use of solid fuels in households increases deforestation. Deforestation is a large contributor to climate change as it decreases the ability of local forests to absorb greenhouse gases (GHGs).
Third, scarcity of readily available biomass also increases the time spent collecting firewood. In Angola, women and children spend up to 7 hours per day collecting firewood, time that could have been spent on more productive activities, like the girls attending more school, and gives women more time for child rearing and gardening/agricultural work, as many have small traditional farms.
Additionally, women and girls also face increased personal security risk when the need to gather wood which gets scarce or fetching water long distances for their household outside of the village, especially in conflict areas or outside refugee camps.
Traditionally, clean cookstoves have been distributed as part of humanitarian or development aid. Millions of cookstoves have been distributed in Africa and Asia, more or less for free, as they have been heavily subsidized by development agencies. This is all about to change, as the cookstove industry is becoming increasingly commercialized and there is a clear trend away from the development aid-based approach.
How Biomass Burning Effects Climate
It has long been known that biomass burning – burning forests to create agricultural lands, burning savannah as a ritual, slash-and-burn agriculture, and wildfires – figures into both climate change and public health. Up until recently with the release of a new study by Stanford University Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, the degree of that contribution had never been comprehensively quantified.
Mark Z. Jacobson, the director of Stanford’s Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Presort Institute for Energy, said almost 8.5 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide – or about 18 percent of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions –comes from biomass burning.
Jacobson noted that some carbon particles – specifically white and gray carbon, the variants associated with some types of ash – can exert a cooling effect because they reflect sunlight. That must be weighed against the warming qualities of the black and brown carbon particles and CO2 emissions generated by biomass combustion to derive a net effect.
Jacobson’s research also demonstrates that it isn’t just the CO2 from biomass burning that’s the problem. Black carbon and brown carbon maximize the thermal impacts of such fires. They essentially allow biomass burning to cause much more global warming per unit weight than other human-associated carbon sources. Black and brown carbon particles increase atmospheric warming in three ways. First, they enter the minuscule water droplets that form clouds. At night, that is not an issue. But during the day, sunlight scatters around within clouds, bathing them in luminescence.
When sunlight penetrates a water droplet containing black or brown carbon particles, Jacobson said, the carbon absorbs the light energy, creating heat and accelerating evaporation of the droplet. Carbon particles floating around in the spaces between the droplets also absorb scattered sunlight, converting it to heat. “Heating the cloud reduces the relative humidity in the cloud,” Jacobson said. This causes the cloud to dissipate. And because clouds reflect sunlight, cloud dissipation causes more sunlight to transfer to the ground and seas, ultimately resulting in warmer ground and air temperatures.
Finally, Jacobson said, carbon particles released from burning biomass settle on snow and ice, contributing to further warming. “Ice and snow are white, and reflect sunlight very effectively,” Jacobson said. “but because carbon is dark it absorbs sunlight, causing snow and ice to melt at accelerated rates. That exposes dark soil and dark seas. And again, because those surfaces are dark, they absorb even more thermal energy from the sunlight, establishing an ongoing amplification process.”
Jacobson said the sum of warming caused by all anthropogenic greenhouse gases – CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and some others – plus the warming caused by black and brown carbon will yield a planetary warming effect of 2 degrees Celsius over the 20-year period simulated by the computer. But light-colored particles – white and gray particles primarily – reflect sunlight and enhance cloudiness, causing more light to reflect. “The cooling effect of these light-colored particles amounts to slightly more than 1 C,” Jacobson said, “so you end up with a total net warming gain of 0.9 C or so. Of that net gain, we’ve calculated that biomass burning accounts for about 0.4 C.” Jacobson’s 3-D models also tracks the impact of the direct heat produced by combusting biomass. “The direct heat generated by burning biomass is significant and contributes to cloud evaporation by decreasing relative humidity,” Jacobson said. “We’ve determined that 7 percent of the total net warming caused by biomass burning – that is, 7 percent of the 0.4 C net warming gain – can be attributed to the direct heat caused by the fires.”
Biomass burning also includes the combustion of agricultural and lumber waste for energy production. Such power generation often is promoted as a “sustainable” alternative to burning fossil fuels. And that is partly true as far as it goes. It is sustainable, in the sense that the fuel can be grown, processed, and converted to energy on a cyclic basis. But the thermal and pollution effects of its combustion – in any form – cannot be discounted, Jacobson said. “The bottom line is that biomass burning is neither clean nor climate-neutral,” he said. “If you’re serious about addressing global warming, you have to deal with biomass burning as well.”
Another Market Assessment was conducted by Global Village Energy Partnerships (GVEP) International, a non-profit organization that works to increase access to modern energy and reduce poverty in developing countries, and Accenture Development Partnerships (ADP), the NGO-arm of the global business consultancy, on behalf of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
It says the use of an electric cookstove represents the cleanest alternative for cooking, as it does not have any direct emissions, this technology is rarely used in the developing world, due to the high costs of electricity and limited access in rural areas.
The second-best alternative, cookstoves based on cleaner fuels like liquid natural gas, etc. also offer a large leap in performance compared to cooking on an open fire. Unfortunately, these technologies are also largely unavailable in poor areas, due to the high investment costs and or fuel prices, as well as their inaccessibility in rural areas.
There were approximately 50 types of improved biomass cookstoves being used around the world, made from various materials, like clay, sand, ceramics, and metals, and various types of rocket stoves that can cost up to $60. Most rocket stoves are priced too high and are out of question for the poor who are most affected. African rural households prefer manufactured rocket stoves, but very few can afford them.
The Tsotso ceramic stoves in Africa are about 39% more efficient that open-fire cooking and sell for about $5-7. Other improved cookstoves around the world can be from somewhere between 30 to perhaps 60% efficient. Improved Clay stoves that can replace traditional clay Chulhas made from stainless molds from clay and sand for as little few dollars which are supposedly 50% more efficient. However, these stoves several decades of trying to get them to switch are not popular with rural Indian women who have been using their traditional Chulhas for generations, even if given for free it is hard to get them to use them for long.
This is just a sizable part of the reason that 4 out of the 10 of the most polluted cities in the world are now in India. However, India has many pollution issues. Coal mines, power plants, heavy traffic, burning plastic waste from overflowing landfills, slash-burning farmers, crowded cities and countryside, lengthy festivals with lots of fireworks, and 1.35 billion crowded in a nation about 40% the size of the United States. In fact, there is a brown carbon haze that often hovers over northern India and the south Pakistan.
With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost. “If we could supply cheap, clean-burning cook stoves to the large portion of the world that burns biomass,” says Guruswami, a Sri Lankan-born professor of international law at the University of Colorado, “we could address a significant international public health problem, and at the same stroke cut a major source of warming.” Some two billion people around the world, Guruswami notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass — dried dung, wood, brush, leaves, bits of coal or charcoal, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher — about three-fourths.
As for the climate aspects, atmospheric scientists have more recently reported that ordinary soot — or black carbon — plays a surprisingly large role in global and regional warming. Some scientists now estimate that small, solid particles of black carbon are responsible for about one-fifth of warming globally and, as such, are the second-largest contributor to climate change, after carbon dioxide gas.
In addition to soaking up heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, dark particles — or aerosols — are blown poleward or up mountains, where they settle on snow and ice and absorb warmth. Although dirty diesel engines, power plants and other more advanced technologies produce black carbon, cooking fires appear to be the largest source of soot in developing nations. Some scientists now estimate that particles of black soot are responsible for about one-fifth of warming globally.
More alarming, extra warming driven by black carbon appears to be especially amplified in the high country of Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, home to the world’s highest mountains. There, in a region sometimes called the “Third Pole,” summer meltwater from 15,000 glaciers that form the headwaters of major rivers that provide water to more than close to 2 billion people in teeming cities and small farms below, in India, China, and smaller nations like Burma and Vietnam. In fact, the plateau has been called “Asia’s water tower,” feeding the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow rivers.
The damages from black carbon alone in places like the Himalayas were studied by NASA and prominent scientist and climatologist James Hansen said black carbon caused about 50% of the rapid melting of its 15,000 glaciers, and the rest of it caused by greenhouse gases. Ice melt in the Himalayas has increased by 20% since the 1970’s. Forty-five million people live in the Himalayas, and nearly 2 billion live in the nations where the Himalayas supply much of their water supply.
Already, glaciers on the plateau have declined by about 20 percent since the 1960s. Scientists have predicted that with rising Asian populations and more open fires, diesel engines, and burning of forests, the glacial melt will accelerate, eventually diminishing the rivers below.
Late last year, NASA reported that black carbon rises into the atmosphere, attaches to dust, and moves with warm-season air patterns to the Himalayan foothills. Heat from the sun warms this “brown cloud,” accelerating its typical monsoon season to rise up the slope, essentially pumping heat up the mountains, according to William Lau, who heads research in atmospheric sciences at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center. Minute black carbon particles once they are attached to dust and taken with the wind to the clouds and mix with water vapor forming droplets black or brown haze.
This NASA image shows a brown haze over Northern India and part of Pakistan that scientists say is mostly caused by human activities, including the burning of biomass. “Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more now than five times faster than warming globally”, Lau said at a press briefing in December 2020, noting that the heating problem is most dramatic in the western part of the Tibetan Plateau. “Based on the differences, it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in [this] region,” he added. “There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”
Enter the cook stove. A November 2009 study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that a decade-long, all-out effort to equip about 90 percent of Indian households that burn biomass with clean-burning cook stoves by 2020 would reduce premature deaths by 17 percent annually, essentially saving 55.5 million years of human life.
The University of Colorado’s Guruswami says that to be workable for billions of people who might live on as little as one dollar a day, a better cook stove must have three main attributes: It must reduce soot, it has to be long-lived, and it has to be cheap — ideally $10 or less. The good news is that inventors and engineers have come up with various versions of efficient cook stoves, some of them both simple to use and inexpensive.
In the early 1980s, Oregon-based engineer Larry Winiarski developed what he called the Rocket Stove, designed for cleaner combustion and more heat using a fire that burns the tips of a long bunch of small wood sticks: To feed the fire as the tips burn away, a cook need only push the bundle in further. The Rocket stove is designed to take advantage of natural convection to burn its biomass more efficiently, and in fact uses about half as much wood as a primitive three-stone fire or simpler stove.
Fort Collins, Colo., home to a major university-based combustion laboratory, is a hotbed of cook-stove advocacy and dissemination. The promise that improved cook stoves hold has triggered government action in India. Envirofit, a nonprofit started by two engineering graduates of Colorado State University and two professors, has developed a modified, patent-pending Rocket stove that it claims is exceptionally durable.
A problem with past designs is that metal combustion chambers tend to quickly fail due to high heat and caustic fumes. But Envirofit worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists to develop a combustion chamber made of metal alloys that give it an exceptionally long life — long enough, it says, that it can issue warranties on the chamber for five years.
About 100,000 Envirofit stoves have already been sold in India, at prices as low as 700 rupees, or about $15. The stoves quickly pay for themselves in fuel savings alone, allowing households to save $50 to $75 annually that would have been spent on wood or other biomass, even while using 60 percent less biomass and eliminating about 80 percent of soot.
Another Fort Collins-based nonprofit, called Trees, Water, and People, focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti, where it promotes local construction of Rocket-type stoves. Working with local partners, the group says it has built more than 35,000 stoves.
In India Scripp’s V. Ramanathan has helped pioneer a newer program that adds a layer of science. Dubbed Project Surya, this nascent effort is conducted in partnership with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Its first community-wide experiment, launched last March in a village in Uttar Pradesh state, will provide cook stoves, along with solar lanterns (to replace sooty kerosene lamps), to every household that wants them. Envirofit says its cook stove will cut smoke and carbon emissions by 80 percent.
The unique feature: The project is designed to collect a wealth of data. A small sensor on the roof of the home of the village leader will provide the first accurate measurements of how much carbon is reduced in the local setting. Regional sensors and satellites will eventually help scientists learn more about more widespread pollution effects.
Regrettably, even with all the new tech the cookstove issue still exists in India mostly because of affordability, and billions worldwide still need these excellent rocket stoves and clean water. One Survey said 94% in Uganda would prefer the rockets stoves—if they could get them for $5 or less. This looks like a chore for the Green Peace Corps.
The United States just sent a mission to Mars in February 2021 and that mission alone cost 3 trillion dollars; we are planning more trips there. We were not alone, because the UAE and China also sent missions to Mars this February, all three missions were just a few days apart.
Yet our planet Earth is the only planet in the cosmic world known to support life as we know it, and we are close to losing life here because of the climate emergency that gives us a short window to change our ways.
Perhaps it is time to come back down to Earth?
