Environmental Sustainability of Bioenergy Strategies in Western Kenya to Address Household Air Pollution

Abstract

Over 640 million people in Africa are expected to rely on solid-fuels for cooking by 2040. In Western Kenya, cooking inefficiently persists as a major cause of burden of disease due to household air pollution. Efficient biomass cooking is a local-based renewable energy solution to address this issue. The Life-Cycle Assessment tool Simapro 8.5 is applied for analyzing the environmental impact of four biomass cooking strategies for the Kisumu County, with analysis based on a previous energy modelling study, and literature and background data from the Ecoinvent and Agrifootprint databases applied to the region. A Business-As-Usual scenario (BAU) considers the trends in energy use until 2035. Transition scenarios to Improved Cookstoves (ICS), Pellet-fired Gasifier Stoves (PGS) and Biogas Stoves (BGS) consider the transition to wood-logs, biomass pellets and biogas, respectively. An Integrated (INT) scenario evaluates a mix of the ICS, PGS and BGS. In the BGS, the available biomass waste is sufficient to be upcycled and fulfill cooking demands by 2035. This scenario has the lowest impact on all impact categories analyzed followed by the PGS and INT. Further work should address a detailed socio-economic analysis of the analyzed scenarios.

Life Cycle Thinking for a Circular Bioeconomy: Current Development, Challenges, and Future Perspectives

“…Finally, in Africa, only three articles were found in sub-Saharan Africa; they aimed exclusively at the assessment of the environmental aspects of biorefinery process biogas [59,60] and biodiesel [23]. The administration of municipal wastes is still a challenge for African governments, so they usually take the biomass for biorefining from the organic fraction of urban wastes [60] to produce bioenergy, and cleaner cooking biofuel to enhance the quality of life of a part of the African population.…”

“…Four journals ("Bioresource Technology," "Bioresource Technology Reports," "Energies," and "Sustainability") published three articles on the theme. The main themes of LCT for a CBE published on these sources are biorefineries for the production of biogas [47,52,53,59], biodiesel [47,53,55], and biochar [47,59], and the production of biopolymers [34,57]. Finally, 20 other journals published two articles or less on this topic (see Figure 4).…”

“…For example, animal wastes are more related to biorefinery processes to produce biofuels (such as biodiesel [55] and biogas [66]). Meanwhile, urban wastes and wastewater are almost exclusively related to being treated by anaerobic digestion to produce biogas (as the main product) and biofertilizer [32,60], or other by-products, e.g., biochar after pyrolysis of the digestate [48,54,59]. Nevertheless, sometimes biogas is passed to be the by-product, e.g., when producing single-cell proteins (the main product), a fermentation process (the main process) is precedes the anaerobic digestion of its effluents [31,41].…”

Circular Bio-economy—Paradigm for the Future: Systematic Review of Scientific Journal Publications from 2015 to 2021

“…Sustainable management and future valorisation of biomass resources to food, feed, fibre, fuel and other bioproducts is indispensable for the struggling economies of Sub-Saharan Africa in particular [381]. Authors of a Kenyan case study [106] have compared the biogas stove, the biomass pellet-fired gasifier stove and the improved cookstove using wood logs, and concluded that the former has the smallest environmental footprint. This is good news as biogas produced from biowastes (manure, wastewater sludge etc.)…”

Bioenergy: A Sustainable Shift

“…It is essential to identify decision-making models that support both policy-makers and other stakeholders by comparing different alternatives [11]. The development of bioenergy must be integrated within emerging markets that support ecologically sound economic development of these territories based upon sustainable models [12]. In this direction, the comparison among countries is valuable in helping researchers to identify which business models have shown the main advantages [13].…”