Biofuel Gel Stove to Fight Indoor Pollution in Nigeria

Focus area: Mitigation
Website
Location: Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria
Established: July 2011

Despite the enormous wealth in energy resources, the vast majority of the Nigerian population is not only extremely poor economically, but energy poor as well. An estimated 98 per cent of households lack access to quality cooking and lighting fuels. This situation compels families to depend wholly on inferior and health damaging fuel wood and kerosene fuel. The overwhelming population of Nigeria is desperate for clean cooking energy.

As one travels throughout the states of Nigeria, fuel wood gathering from forests that have become marginal, together with long queues of people waiting to purchase kerosene that is perennially scarce, is in evidence everywhere. For the most part, women are seen in the evenings returning home carrying enormous bundles of fuel wood on their head after a full day's drudgery of wood gathering.

In the urban centers, up to nine per cent of the households depend on kerosene to supplement fuel wood in some cases. About 1 per cent depends on Liquefied Petroleum Gas. The use of kerosene has been hampered by a corrupt distribution system, poor quality and condensate“ laden kerosene that burn with high emissions of soot and particulate matter. Contaminated kerosene has continued to claim lives in Nigeria.

This activity's mission is to spread the use of clean and improved cook stove technology as a replacement to charcoal, firewood and expensive LPGs in Africa as simply and as rapidly as possible. That's why this activity has done everything possible to eliminate obstacles and risks associated with the use of the latter.

Mitigation / Adaptation

An estimate of 4,375,000 tonnes of CO2eq emissions will be avoided per year as a result of this activity. The five new micro distillery plants are estimated to produce at least 10,000 liters per day of ethanol and consumed in replacement of kerosene, firewood and charcoal. The activity has two sources of avoided emissions: the direct avoided emissions and the energy saving in the process of ethanol production. In addition, once the ethanol is produced by the commercialization of these new technologies in Nigeria, a large decrease in CO2 emissions is anticipated.

Other areas include:

Minimizing the environmental impact, through an activity which wastes are all reused, and using a fuel that does not emit pollutants;
Decreasing the deforestation caused by users of the wood stoves;
Reducing the levels of domestic pollution, by encouraging the use of the biofuel stoves, replacing the traditional wood-fired stoves;
Reducing the impacts of the rural exodus in the urban areas;
Adopting other domestic uses for ethanol, such as flashlights, energy generators, tractors, etc.
Recovering of degraded areas by the use of organic fertilizer;
Switching to Ethanol Biofuel and Solar lantern will reduce the risks faced by millions still depend dent on fossil fuel. We have practically increased energy security in the communities where we work.

Benefits

Community engagement was sought when planning and developing the activity - a major factor to the level of our achievement today is the fact that we were able to create energy and system that people can own.

Poverty alleviation, including tackling root causes of poverty, injustice and discrimination: With more than 8,000 Green ambassadors and some other 36,000 customers, our model in six months led many beneficiary and partners out of poverty while giving power to them to own, generate and sell energy to others.
Improvement in the quality of life, including through education, health, security and a healthy environment. The center of our activity is to place emphasis on education and economic empowerment for our customers and Green Ambassadors.

With over 30,000 families and still growing, we are making energy access free and accessible to those that need it most.

Many green forests and tress have been cut down for firewood; kerosene scarcity and spills are often experienced while today, biofuel has become the fastest growing energy to the communities.

Over 8,000 jobs have been created in six months.

The quality of health of local households has improved.

Potential for scaling-up and replication

Our activity today is no longer a demonstration; we have proven that biogel fuel is possible and sustainable. We are currently developing micro gel plants across the country. Today, we only have two plants in Lagos and Ogun State. These plants are serving our entire network across the country.

However, transporting our packaged gels is expensive; we hope to overcome this by continuing to build more micro gel plants in cities and communities where we operate.

Success in effective adoption of renewable energy products in a developing nation is Market Education and Incentive rather than flooding the market with products that will never be consumed as the cost of marketing, distribution and management of such models will quickly kill the company therefore its unsustainable.

What we have done having played in both renewable energy technology development and marketing for more than five years is to allow an organic growth integration of the market while investing in training, support and incentivizing our Green Ambassadors who make this happen for us without being on our payroll.

Rather than rushing to the market to sell millions of liters of our biogel fuel, we decided to segment and rely on a social one on one referral introduction of our products to customers ( We have concentrated on allowing someone to introduce our biogel and stove to another thereby giving power to the people while we continue to provide superior support, incentive and leadership to the way it expands and grow) What we have observed is that people will continue to use the fuel based on the recommendation of their friend and therefore re orders more from the same friend or Simply becomes a distributor as well and gradually expanding our network of users.