Monday, april 28, 2014
Biofuel for cooking stoves revolutionizing African households
more than half of the world’s population relies on dung, wood, crop waste or coal to meet their most basic energy needs. Cooking and heating with such solid fuels on open fires or stoves without chimneys leads to indoor air pollution. This indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants including small soot or dust particles that are able to penetrate deep into the lungs. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can exceed acceptable levels for small particles in outdoor air 100-fold. Exposure is particularly high among women and children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth. Indoor smoke pollution is a real killer in the kitchen. According to the WHO, every year indoor air pollution is responsible for the death of 1.6 million people - that's one death every 20 seconds
Now a new, simple and sustainable biofuel is silently bringing a revolution to African households: ethanol gel. The low cost gel is smokeless, odourless, not poisonous, easy to handle and to store and can be used in traditional cooking stoves. Moreover, it reduces CO2 emissions by up to 50% compared to wood and diminishes pressures on forests. To produce gelfuel, denatured ethanol from sugar or starch crops is mixed with a thickening agent (cellulose) and water through a very simple technical process, resulting in a combustible gel. The gelfuel is thus renewable and can be locally produced in most countries in Africa. Jellified and/or solidified liquid fuels (kerosene and ethanol) have been in use since World War II, when they were used by soldiers for cooking.
The advantage of the ethanol gel fuel is that it can be made from so many tropical crops - from sorghum over cassava to tapioca, sweet potatoes, sugar cane and maize, to name but a few.
Several initiatives like the World Bank's Millennium Gelfuel Initiative - a public-private partnership aimed at adapting and disseminating the cooking fuel for the African household sector - have yielded encouraging results. Consumer tests and marketing assessments conducted in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, and Zimbabwe have overwhelmingly affirmed the appeal and potential commercial viability of the gelfuel. More than 15 African and 2 Latin American countries have expressed interest in introducing the local production and marketing of the gelfuel, and concrete private sector driven Millennium Gelfuel investment projects are being prepared in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Other large commercialisation efforts are underway elsewhere. In Swaziland, for example, local people are "extatic" about a gel fuel project, because not only does it deliver cheaper and cleaner energy than wood, its production also brings in jobs and gives a boost to the local economy. The company in question has made a €uro 4 million investment and will be sourcing cassava as a feedstock from small farmers. Women entrepreneurs will sell the gel packs on local markets. "Everything comes together so nicely", as one woman in Swaziland said enthusiastically about the project. We agree with her.
With all of the talk about our dependency on foreign oil and its economic and environmental costs people are very hungry a cheaper alternative that is also good for our atmosphere and biofuels could be that next energy source. We should however analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using biofuel to replace gasoline as the dominant fuel source not just in our country but globally.
Advantages of biofuel
1. It is a very green friendly fuel that can help to halt and even in some cases reverse our current rising levels of green house gas that oil has had a major contributing factor in.
2. It can be made from many sources such as plant material, fungi and algae and since these source are available in abundance and can potentially reproduced on a massive scale they are an energy source that is potentially unlimited.
3. It will end our need to depend on opec and other foreign countries for our energy needs and can potentially help to bring world peace.
4. Biofuels can also help to stimulate jobs locally and can thus have the potential to turn around a global economy that has been slumping for a while now. They are also much safer to handle than gasoline and therefore cause lesser long term health effects on the human body.
As you can see these are all very good advantages in favor of this awesome new fuel source but just like all others, there are also some negative factors involved here.
Disadvantages of biofuel
1. As of right now even though biofuels produce much lesser green house gases the machines that are used to cultivate and produce them still have some problems with carbon emissions so we still need to work on newer ways to produce them in a more greener way.
2. Our technological process to produce biofuels are way to costly for us to be able to afford on a massive scale. We still need billions of dollars of research money into having a manufacturing process that will produce them at a cheaper rate.
3. We still don't have anywhere near the amount of biofuel converted cars to be able to take advantage of this fuel source. We will need to invest trillions of dollars to change the automobile infrastructure to allow us to take advantage of this awesome natural fuel.
4. Once we are able to build large manufacturing plants we will need to find a way to deal with the very bad smell that is the outcome of the biofuel production cycle and large towns will not want to put up with this bad odor produced.
While there are some disadvantages to biofuel the potential is just to great to ignore and push forward with. This is the energy source of the future so the sooner we can get it to the manufacturing process and made available to the masses the faster we will be able to solve the problems we are now facing with gasoline only lasting another 20 to 30 years
Adediran Aremu Shola
The Manufacturer of Biofuel Gel in Nigeria.
2348062777516, 2348179545958
