Now this balance between consumption and production seems to be upset in some countries or areas. Therefore the renewable potentialities or sustainability has to be defined in geographical terms. This is the reason of the chart I projected on the screen.
If this point was not observed, then there may be big errors. For instance, in the publication of the American Energy Information Administration (AEIA) try to define the primary source of total Energy consumed in Chad. It said oil consumption 100%, and likewise the carbon emissions to oil alone equally attributed to 100%. This is a contradiction. It may be explained by the fact that the renew ability or sustainability is taken in an abstract sense.
It is supposed (not proved) that the carbon emissions are entirely taken up by biomass - by forests, but this is probably not true. Let me add that the AEIA is created to observe the functioning of oil market in the world and to design mathematical models of the functioning. So it is explainable that they are not very much interested in wood energy. Especially when the wood energy is not marketed on the international scale.
The real situation is that fuel-wood accounts for the greater part of the energy consumed in Chad. Petroleum consumption is relatively lower. A small amount of energy is consumed in the agricultural sector. The consumption of charcoal is growing. But according to our diagram the original material source of charcoal, which is wood, was not considered.
Now let us consider prices for the different energy forms that exist in Chad. And the cheapest energy form is fuel-wood. For easy comparison the prices are given in relation CFA to Mega Joule (MJ). French CFA is the national currency of Chad. CFA stands for French African Community and Mega Joule is the International System unit of energy or work. These figures are taken from a document of the World Bank from 1998.
You can see that the various form of energy is electricity that is not available for the majority of the people. Only 1% of the population have accessible to current. EPG (Electric Pressurised Gas) is also very expensive and therefore only small minority could afford it. Kerosene, also form energy is very expensive and in some cases dangerous. The most interesting form of energy in our context is charcoal. In Chad, charcoal is produced with low degrees of efficiency.
Our chart shows the role of biomass in different area of the world. You will see that in Africa, third line from down, biomass consumption is about 52% of the total energy forms available. The largest part of this biomass is consumed in households.
But you will see that even in Asia, (India and China) for example, the role of biomass is still an important one, despite their nuclear capabilities.
The rest of the population growth compounds the energy problem. In the urban areas, cities and towns it is four times as high as in the rural areas. The general population growth is high. This rapid population growth has serious consequences.
Because town people prefer charcoal. Because charcoal burn without much fume. And it is easy to handle, easy to store and the easy to transport because it less voluminous and can be more densely parked and could be relatively cheap transported over a long distance. So in the immediate vicinity of the towns, it is easier to transport wood. But these wood resources around the towns have been depleted. Practically disappeared. It has to be substituted with another energy form. So charcoal has to be transported over long distance.
This is the situation in many African countries and it has important consequences on the forest stand. Not only the rain forest are endangered, but also the drier areas, which are much more endangered than typical rain forest. And we can see here that the world forests stands are diminishing, except in the industrial countries.
Why? Because the industrial countries have other sources of energy and for non-energy purposes they can also exploit forests resources of the south. While southern countries depend - for household energy - mainly on their forests and wood reserve.
Now, to come back to Chad, there is a rapid sift from wood to charcoal use for the reasons I already explained. And the increase is at about 8% annually. And this is compounded by rapid urbanisation of over 70% per year. In about 2020 or 2030 there will be over 100 very big cities in the West African region. And by 2030, I think over 60% of the West African population will be dwelling in the urban areas.
Now if charcoal is used in the towns, then there is a problem. For example in Chad the transformation of wood into charcoal has a low efficiency. Take for example a kilo of wood, if this is processed in Chad to make charcoal, the result will be about 130g of charcoal. This is an efficiency of about 13%. In Burkina Faso it is even less, then they have about 11% efficiency. In some countries as low as 8% has been recorded, I think Rwanda.
Now charcoal contains double the amount of energy as wood on equal weight basis. So the lost of energy is not as important, because we conceder the weight.
In some areas of the world history has been civilisation, cities which had to be given up and such a city is the ruins of Wara, the capital of Ouddaï, in the east of Chad. When the German explorer Nachtingal was there in 1870, the town had been already abandoned about 50 years ago.
But then it was founded around 1600 and something. There was a sick bush around the town and plenty of wood. So it was easy to bake bricks. You can see ruins of buildings made with baked bricks, abandoned and almost a desert. And probably the town has been abandoned because of wood shortage and the surrounding dried up.
We see the anticipated cost of biomass consumption in Africa until 2030 and we see that the role of the most important consumer of biomass remains with the households.
Now the figures here are from the World Energy Outlook of the World Energy Agency.
Lets now consider carbon production during the processing of charcoal with 13% efficiency.
If we take 1 Kg of wood about 50% of 2.5 of the weight is constituted by carbon. This carbon is used to make charcoal, with certain percent efficiency we have to consider that charcoal contains other substances as well and about 90% is made by carbon; so that is why this figure of 4.12 Kg.
The rest of the carbon is emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and even as methane. Methane, I believe, has a special influence on the climate. The climate damaging effect is 21 times higher than that of carbon dioxide, calculated over 100 years. The degree of efficiency determines the amount of carbon particles emitted into the atmosphere. The optimum efficiency that can be obtained in the laboratories is 31%. That means we can win 310g of charcoal from 1 Kg of wood. The optimum efficiency attainable in African field conditions is about 20%.
We are now observing the role of biomass in household energy, for cooking purposes. Now there is much talking about renewable energies. The most first thing of photovoltaic when this running word is mentioned. But this cannot substitute biomass, because we have seen the price differences. And poor people do use electricity for lighting, radio and etc. but not for cooking because it is expensive.
This citation is also from the World Energy Outlook 2002, the chapter on poverty and energy:
“There is a widespread misconception that electricity substitutes for biomass. Poor people use electricity selectively mostly for lighting and communication devices. They often continue to cook with wood or dunk always and such other fuels like LPG and Kerosene”.
But poor people in Chad don’t use LPG at all. It is relatively expensive. Rather, they rarely use kerosene. This picture is recently taken in Saharat. It is a very big town.
The women on the picture are interested in solar-cooking. One of this women, the second from the left, has a number of undertakings and for that matter she consumes 100 Kg of charcoal per week. And she told me this amount decreased to 50 Kg per week, since she started using solar-cookers. I must add that she cooks not only for her family, but runs a restaurant and she makes chibata, which needs energy during preparation. And there are other activities too needing energy.
But some people say that the aluminium plates used in solar-cookers needs lot of energy to be produced. This is true, but let us calculate here: 1 Kg of aluminium needs about 13 KW/h during manufacturing. That is about 46.8 M/Kg. One needs about 3 Kg of aluminium sheets to construct for example a “Butterfly-cooker” and that is about 140 MJ.
If we assume a household that uses wood as well as charcoal. Suppose this household consumes about 0.5 Kg of charcoal per day. That is equal to 50.5 MJ. Replacing this amount with solar-cooking will compensate the energy consumed during the manufacture of the aluminium sheets in only nine days. So I think this is a very good equivalence.
Let me say that solar-cookers should be about the expenses of town people because of ecological gains when charcoal is replaced by solar-cooking. Also if you replaced wood with solar-cooking, the result is the same. So our concentration should be on urban dwellers or town people.
Solar-cookers can create employment. Our experience in Burkina-Faso is that two workmen can make about 250 Butterfly-cookers in a year. If 100,000 cookers were produced, this would mean 800 jobs. And 30% of the end price goes for labour costs. And supposing a price of €155.00 the cost of labour will be about €52.50 and this will be a very good gain for labour, for workmen.
Here we see a Butterfly-cooker in Burkina Faso. In this instance they were using it to make Mango-Jam for sale. And that is an example that solar-cookers could be useful for small-scale enterprise. The promotion of solar-cookers is in the government policies, but nothing has been done up to now by the government.
I finish now with this drawing from a child. As you can see, for him the world is split into two parts: One part characterised with high buildings, vehicles and aeroplanes is for the white people and the other part for the black people. And he is on both sides. He wrote here: “Blacks and whites will visit each other now”.
Thank you.
Dr. Krämer: Solar-cookers are still very expensive for people needing them. But I think the price could be brought down if the appropriate policies are realized. The price could be brought down for instance by financial means obtained through the CDM mechanism or through other programs combating poverty.
In the past gas has been subsidized with the intention to save the forest and again the subsidy was cut off because it was a burden for the national budgets. But the best subsidy that could be realised from my point of view would be to subsidise solar-cooker; because it is outside the carbon cycle.
If there are no further questions for the moment I would like to thank you for being here.