Sustainable Charcoal Making

Long description

According to the Sugar Directorate in Kenya, the 12 sugar mills located on the western side of the country generate around 2.4 million tons of bagasse annually that remain unutilized (UNEP 2019: Sustainability of sugarcane bagasse briquettes and charcoal value chains in Kenya). Currently, there are two companies utilizing it to produce non-carbonized briquettes at USD125 per ton. Unfortunately, biomass briquettes are very expensive for household use. Major consumers of non-carbonized briquettes include the tea and tobacco industries. Menengai Oil Refineries uses firewood from suppliers at USD75 per ton. On the other hand, a 50kg bag of charcoal costs USD21, translating to USD420 per ton. This project wants to make the costly but clean-burning biomass briquettes affordable and, therefore, accessible to more customers thereby reducing reliance on firewood/forests. The project seeks to introduce the use of high-efficiency gasifier cookstoves to heavy firewood-consuming businesses to carbonize the biomass briquettes while cooking and then resell them to offset the high costs and indirectly make the product affordable. Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute has in its database high-quality gasifier cookstoves that can produce charcoal at 20 – 30% efficiency. When used on these gasifier cookstoves, a ton of biomass briquettes costing USD125 can yield at least 0.2 tons of carbonized briquettes worth USD84. This means that one recovers USD84 out of USD125 spent on purchasing non-carbonized briquettes. The balance of USD41 is now the actual amount spent, which is lower than USD75 used to purchase firewood, hence demand stimulation for non-carbonized briquettes.

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