Need for Clean Energy - The figures in the article are really appalling - TOI - 23/01/2008

A green stove for the developing world’s health

Amanda Leigh Haag

When Kurt Hoffman visited Tanzania in the 1970s as a young product-development researcher, he could hardly bear to enter village huts to ask questions.
“I couldn’t stand the smoke, the pain in my eyes and the coughing,” he said. “And yet the women and children were sitting there the whole time,” enveloped in smoke from open pit fires or poorly functioning stoves. Some 30 years later, when Hoffman returned to the field in his position as director of the Shell Foundation, a charity in Britain established by the Shell Group, not much had changed. “To find that it still exists,” he said, “I was appalled by it. I said to myself, ‘There has to be a better way.’”
And there may be. The foundation has partnered with Envirofit International at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, to introduce the first market-based model for clean-burning wood stove technology to the developing world.
This year, the team plans to begin distributing 10 million stoves, focusing first on India, Brazil, Kenya and Uganda at a variety of prices over five years. Hoffman played a leading role in the development of the Shell Foundation’s ‘Breathing Space’ program, founded in 2002, one of the first to focus on the problem of indoor air pollution.
Half of the world population and 80% of rural households in developing countries cook with solid fuels like wood, coal, crop residues and dung. In many instances, women cook around open fires, typically with a pot atop three large stones and a wood fire in the middle. Indoor air pollution, including smoke and other products of incomplete combustion like carbon monoxide, is a major environmental risk factor, usually ranking behind lack of clean water, poor sanitation and malnutrition. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.6 million people a year die of health effects resulting from toxic indoor air.
At Envirofit headquarters in the old Fort Collins power plant, researchers are designing and testing clean-burning stoves that they say will significantly improve air quality and require less wood fuel. An important feature will be the ability to control carefully the air pulled in. Too much intake cools the process, leading to incomplete combustion. In a modern gas stove, nearly 100% of the carbon is burned to carbon dioxide. With traditional stoves in the developing world, 90% is fully converted to CO2. The remainder forms a toxic cocktail of byproducts like benzene, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde that billow out in soot and smoke. Envirofit’s stoves will be designed with an insulated chamber that cuts down on energy loss and maintains heat inside the chamber walls. NYT NEWS SERVICE