Comparative Cooking Costs in Developing Countries

By Douglas Barnes and Keith Openshaw

Kerosene Lamps and Stoves, Hyderabad, India by D. Barnes

Recently we have just reviewed many of programs for improved stoves in developing countries, and we were quite surprised to find that there were few analyses of comparative cooking costs. In the glory days of country energy assessments comparing the cost of cooking to enlighten energy policy makers was very common. Today we stress energy efficiency, combustion, emissions, and carbon. However, if people are going to adopt these stoves the comparative cooking costs are an obvious important place to start. Keith Openshaw who has extensive experience with improved stoves is a coauthor of this posting. 

To revive this lost art, we will explain the steps for calculating comparative cooking. The first step is to assemble the necessary data. This includes:

• Cost of the stove;
• Lifetime of the stove;
• Efficiency of the stove;
• Price of fuels used burned by the stove including wood or other biomass fuels;
• Fuel collection hours for biomass fuels;
• Quantity of fuel consumed in the household per month; and
• Average wage of agricultural workers.

One caveat is that the comparative costs in this analysis are hypothetical because they assume that families cook exclusively with one fuel. Also, we use world market prices and average fuel consumption levels as defined by many different household energy surveys. Thus, these figures can be considered as typical but they do not relate to any one country due to various policies to tax and subsidize household fuels. They at least give us some perspective on the comparative costs of cooking in developing countries.

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Cooking with LPG: Climate and Poverty Issues

What is the largest improved stove program in the developing world? The answer may surprise you. It is the Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) stove. The use of LPG worldwide has been growing for many years. It is not a renewable fuel like biomass energy, but it is clean burning and provides much greater efficiency than even the best improved biomass stoves. For those not familiar with LPG, it is quite similar to propane.

Retail LPG Use in India in Millions: Industry Source

LPG is quite commonly used in urban areas of developing countries and is becoming increasingly common in rural areas. In India alone since 1985 the petroleum industry reports that over 100 million households have switched from other cooking sources to LPG. Today even close to 20% of rural household are using LPG mostly for quick heating such as water boiling, and this amounts to about 30 million households. Not only is LPG subsidized in India, but it has become more widely available over the years.

India has had an aggressive LPG promotion campaign for years and just recently announced that there will be a program to provide free stoves to households below the poverty line. The subsidies no doubt are expensive for the government and as the program continues to expand one can question whether such subsidies are justifiable given the ready acceptance of LPG by the mostly high and middle income consumers. But one also might just imagine the positive health impacts of the widespread substitution of LPG for fuelwood. Cooking with LPG gives off minimum pollution and alleviates indoor air pollution.

LPG Cooking in Hyderbad India: by D. Barnes

One little understood fact is that LPG is used mainly by middle to high income families, but it also has indirect impacts on poor urban households who do not even use it. Why is this? The main reason is the pattern of dynamics of energy pricing. Obviously high taxes on LPG raise its overall price and conversely subsides lower the price. The price of fuelwood for cooking quite often mimics price of LPG or kerosene in large urban areas after taking into consideration energy efficiency. Poor people in urban areas generally purchase biomass fuels such as fuelwood or charcoal, so high LPG prices mean high prices for biomass energy. The poor spend quite a bit of their income on energy; it can be as high as high as 15 to 20 percent. Thus, the price of biomass energy is obviously very important for their welfare.

Concerning climate change, encouraging the substitution of LPG for biomass fuels actually may be a winning prospect. It actually takes just over 11 kilograms of wood to provide the same cooking heat as one kilogram of LPG due to higher energy content and greater efficiencies of gas stoves. After some further conversions, for the same cooking task wood burned in open fires actually gives off 4 times more CO2 compared to LPG. It is true that some wood is from renewable sources, but do we really know how much? Also, is it really relevant? Perhaps, but the CO2 is going into the air regardless of its source.

This also does not mean that we should give up on making biomass stoves that are less polluting and more or efficient (see previous blog on new generation of improved stoves). Some new stoves give off levels of pollution that similar to using LPG. There is also a role for cooking with other fuels and technologies such as biogas or perhaps even alcohol in developing countries.

The ultimate goal is to alleviate energy poverty and there are many ways to do it. This might even include the promotion of LPG for cooking. What do you think?

poll by twiigs.com

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