Publication: Comparison of Bottled Gas and Advanced Combustion Pellet Stoves
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Date
2021-06
ISSN
Published
2021-06
Author(s)
Abstract
For those who prefer to cook with gas but are not connected to a natural gas pipeline—and nearly all rural households fall under this category, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is the main option. For those for whom LPG is too costly and wish to cook with biomass because of its ready availability, lower cost, and familiarity, advanced combustion stoves burning pelletized biomass fuel may hold the best promise of clean energy. LPG and advanced combustion stoves have many challenges in common but also unique challenges of their own. Arguably the greatest obstacle is the high cost of their use as primary energy sources. Essentially all challenges cited in the literature, stovetops being too small or unstable for large pots and pans and for vigorous stirring, the inability to cook large meals or several dishes in parallel, difficulties of reloading pellets in the middle of cooking, fears about explosions and burns, and the inconvenience of waiting for refill LPG delivery after finding the cylinder empty, to name a few, can be addressed, but at a significant cost. In high-income economies, millions of households have been using gas to meet all their cooking and heating needs (supplemented by electricity for certain appliances such as rice cookers and microwave ovens) but at a cost that would be unaffordable to many, if not most, households in developing countries. Commercially viable solutions to these problems for advanced combustion stoves, such as auto-ignition and automated pellet loading mechanisms, are not yet available. The emission performance of advanced combustion biomass stoves has been compromised by use of polluting start-up materials and practices, heterogeneity of biomass used (size, moisture content, type), and excessive emissions during fuel reloading and the burn-out phase. Battery and other equipment failures increase emissions further or can even render the stove inoperative. Deterioration in emission levels with the stove age has also found to be worryingly high in one study, pointing to the need to improve the durability of stove performance in the field.
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Citation
“Kojima, Masami. 2021. Comparison of Bottled Gas and Advanced Combustion Pellet Stoves. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35949 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”