Comparison of Bottled Gas and Advanced Combustion Pellet Stoves
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...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/440901626157056956/Comparison-of-Bottled-Gas-and-Advanced-Combustion-Pellet-Stoves http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35949 |
| Summary: | 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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