Supply Considerations for Scaling Up Clean Cooking Fuels for Household Energy in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries

Abstract

Promoting access to clean household cooking energy is an important subject for policy making in low-and middle-income countries, in light of urgent and global efforts to achieve universal energy access by 2030 (Sustainable Development Goal 7). In 2014, the World Health Organization issued "Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality: Household Fuel Combustion", which recommended a shift to cleaner fuels rather than promotion of technologies that more efficiently combust solid fuels. This study fills an important gap in the literature on transitions to household use of clean cooking energy by reviewing supply chain considerations for clean fuel options in low-and middle-income countries. For the purpose of this study, we consider electricity, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), alcohol fuels, biogas, and compressed biomass pellets burned in high performing gasifier stoves to be clean fuel options. Each of the clean fuels reviewed in this study, as well as the supply of electricity, presents both constraints and opportunities for enhanced production, supply, delivery, and long-term sustainability and scalability in resource-poor settings. These options are reviewed and discussed together with policy and regulatory considerations to help in making these fuel and energy choices available and affordable. Our hope is that researchers, government officials and policy makers, and development agencies and investors will be aided by our comparative analysis of these clean household energy choices.

Health and Climate Impacts of Scaling Adoption of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) for Clean Household Cooking in Cameroon: A Modeling Study

“…These differences did not account for the differential potential for LPG adoption according to different settings and socio-economic groups (Puzzolo et al 2016;Shupler et al 2019). We acknowledge that affordability to the household, prices of competing fuels, supply-chain reliability, and last-mile distribution are all potential factors that contribute to clean fuel adoption, even in best-case scenarios of plentiful cylinder refills available in the market (Rosenthal et al 2017;Puzzolo et al 2019). We provide no estimates regarding the health equity of the policy scenarios.…”

Drivers of the Adoption and Exclusive Use of Clean Fuel for Cooking in Sub-Saharan Africa: Learnings and Policy Considerations from Cameroon

“…The wider use of LPG for clean cooking in peri-urban/urban compared to rural LMIC settings has been documented in the literature [24,26,[40][41][42]. Reported reasons for this disparity include greater access to clean fuels in urban areas, lack of access to LPG in rural contexts, relative poverty and the opportunity costs of freely gathered biomass in rural settings [17,23,50]. In support of these hypotheses, this study found that people living in rural areas were significantly more likely to report perceiving LPG as expensive and more difficult to obtain than peri-urban households.…”

“…A number of countries in SSA have developed national plans to increase uptake of LPG for domestic use amongst their populations under the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) initiative and more recently SGD 7 [14][15][16]. LPG is an ideal clean cooking fuel to promote in many countries because it is portable; easy to store and transport; and requires much less costly infrastructure compared to natural gas or electricity, meaning that adoption can be rapidly scaled [14,17]. It is also a safe fuel (when used and regulated correctly) and provides substantial health and environmental benefits [11,14,18,19].…”

“…One of the crucial barriers, highlighted above, is the prohibitive cost of becoming a new user for many low-income earners. Promotion of microloans or other financial incentives [17,66,71] to address upfront LPG equipment costs, and recurrent refill costs, is now receiving greater attention and community microfinance receives specific attention in the Cameroon National LPG Masterplan [20]. Interventions which would target some of the key factors effecting LPG uptake and exclusive use (adapted from Rosenthal et al [72] (p. A6).…”

Systems Science Approaches for Global Environmental Health Research: Enhancing Intervention Design and Implementation for Household Air Pollution (HAP) and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Programs

“…Beyond these technology lessons, several implementation issues have emerged, leading HAP interventions to fall short of expectations. These include low initial adoption rates for clean fuels and stoves (Lewis and Pattanayak 2012;Mobarak et al 2012;Troncoso and Soares da Silva 2017), concomitant use of polluting stoves (stove stacking) among adopters (Masera et al 2000;Puzzolo et al 2016), and issues with supply chains and cost for both stoves and fuels (Jagger and Das 2018;Puzzolo et al 2019).…”