Life-Cycle Assessment of Stacked Cooking Fuels in Rural India
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Life-Cycle Assessment of Stacked Cooking Fuels in Rural India Civil Systems and the Environment Fall 2018 UC Berkeley Submitted by: John Dees, Jack Chang, Matthew Mayes, Yue (Nicole) Wu, and Surabhi Yadav Instructor: Professor Arpad Horvath 2 Abstract In 2016, in an effort to reduce the national environmental health burden, the government of India launched a policy effort, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), with the goal of subsidizing 80 million new liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cookstove connections by 2019. As of 2017, an earlier goal of 50 million connections had been met, and the government extended its LPG goal for 2019. Recently the issue has been raised that the complete adoption of LPG and the replacement of traditional biofuels hasn’t occurred as hoped. Rather, due the perceived high price of LPG and difficulty obtaining refills, varying degrees of fuel stacking with traditional and modern fuels are common. While previous studies have performed life-cycle impact assessments to compare LPG and traditional fuels, none have taken into account fuel stacking and rebound effects. This study seeks to quantify the health and climate relevant impacts of various fuel stacking scenarios both at the household and policy-wide scales. We expect the analysis to illuminate a more realistic relationship between the costs of implementing such an ambitious policy and realized benefits at this stage of India’s energy transition. 3 Table of Contents Executive Summary 6 1. Introduction 7 2. Problem Statement 8 3. Key Questions 9 4. Background 9 4.1 Emissions Performance and Health Relevant Impacts of LPG Cookstoves 4.2 Health Impacts of Household Air Pollution From Biomass-Based Cookstoves 4.3 Health Impacts of Ambient Air Pollution From Biomass-Based Cookstoves 4.4 Environmental Impacts of Biomass-Based Cookstoves 4.5 Life-Cycle Impact Assessment of Cooking Fuels 4.6 Fuel Stacking and Rebound Effect 5. Modeling Approach and Data 16 5.1 Goal 5.2 Scope: Functional Unit and System Boundary 5.3 LCIA Methodology 5.4 Life-Cycle Inventory of Fuels 5.5 Scenario Modeling 6. Results and Findings 20 6.1 Human Exposure to Household Air Pollution 6.2 Biomass 6.3 Methanol 7. Sensitivity Analysis 27 8. Uncertainty Assessment 29 9. Interpretation and Discussion 30 9.1 Potential Household Health Impacts of LPG Under Variable Fuel Stacking Scenarios 9.2 Tradeoffs between Health and Environmental Impacts with Regard to Cooking Fuel Policy 4 10. Conclusions and Recommendations 32 References 34 List of Tables and Figures Table 1. Studies Evaluating Efficiency and Emissions From LPG Cookstoves 10 Table 2. Studies Evaluating Ambient Air Pollution in India Caused by Biomass Burning 12 Table 3. Previous LCA studies of Cooking Fuels 15 Table 4. Uncertainty Matrix of Data Categories 30 Figure 1. System Boundaries of LCIA analysis 17 Figure 2. User Behavior: Fuel Stacking Scenarios 20 Figure 3. Overall Environmental Impact. 21 Figure 4. Relative LCIA Midpoint Results for Three 100% Fuel Scenarios 22 Figure 5. 100% LPG: Grouping Activities in the Supply Chain. 23 Figure 6. CO2 (Kg) by Process: Fuel Stacking Scenarios 24 Figure 7. PM2.5 (Kg) by Process: Fuel Stacking Scenarios 25 Figure 8. Household PM2.5 Exposure-Response 26 Figure 9. Sensitivity for Global Warming Potential in 10 scenarios 28 Figure 10. Sensitivity for Particulate Matter Formation in 10 scenarios 29 5 Executive Summary Every day, 2.8 billion people across the globe depend on solid fuel (e.g. biomass and coal) burned in smoky, inefficient stoves to cook their meals. Twenty-five percent of these solid fuel users live in India. The health impacts are well understood: Smoke from household cooking is the second leading risk factor for disease in the developing world and is responsible for about 4.3 million premature deaths annually, disproportionately affecting women and children. In an unprecedented effort, the government of India distributed 50 million new liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stoves and fuel canisters to poor households with a unique broad-scale crowdfunding campaign and a US$1.5 billion budget. This program is known as Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY). The intended application of this LCIA analysis is to assess the potential health and environmental impacts of the PMUY policy given the dual problems of rebound and fuel stacking in households. Additionally, this study seeks to understand the implications of a new policy mandating that LPG be manufactured with 30% methanol from coal. The purpose of this research is to model realistic household cooking fuel use scenarios to quantify the policy’s health and environmental implications at both the household and national level. Moreover, we intend to perform sensitivity analyses quantifying the range of outcomes associated with differing assumptions about fugitive emissions and cookstove efficiency. The intended audience of this report would include policy decision-makers and academic researchers concerned with the health and environmental impacts of energy policy in India. We analyze the “cradle to grave” life cycle of LPG and biomass cooking fuels. OpenLCA software was used to perform LCIA. The methodology follows directives from the International Organization ISO 14040- ISO 14044 series and the procedure entails: 1) Goal and Scope 2) Inventory Analysis 3) Impact Assessment. The ReCiPe impact assessment methodology was used to determine endpoint environmental impacts. The stages of impact assessment include: 1) Classification 2) Characterization and 3) Normalization. Our model will seek to understand life-cycle impacts of cooking fuel use as it’s likely to occur under a set of fuel stacking scenarios at the household level. Using the functional unit of 1 GJ as a basis, we model the impacts of generating 1 GJ of cooking energy with various shares of LPG and biomass (wood and dung cake) fuels as indicated by the literature on fuel stacking and rebound effects. The impacts are measured principally in global warming potential and PM2.5 produced. 6 1. Introduction People worldwide have cooked with wood, dung and other biomass for centuries and suffered from illnesses caused by inhaling the resulting emissions (Smith & Pillarisetti 2017). The definitions may not have existed millenia ago, but we now know that regular exposure to particulate matter emanating from cookfires using solid fuels causes a range of respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, pneumonia and lung cancer, among other illnesses (Smith 2000). Today, about 40 percent of people globally still use wood, coal and agricultural residues as cooking fuels (Smith & Pillarisetti 2017). The International Energy Agency estimated in 2016 that 3.5 million people die prematurely every year due to household air pollution (HAP) largely caused by cooking with biomass, with a million dying annually in India alone (Patnaik et al.2017). Cooking with biomass also generates about a third of the ambient air pollution in India (Chafe et al.2015) - an environmental problem that has reached epidemic proportions in recent decades in India. In South Asia, 200,000 deaths every year were caused by ambient air pollution in 2010, the vast majority of them occurring in India (Chafe et al.2015). According to the 2013 Global Burden of Disease Study, household air pollution was ranked as the top environmental health risk factor globally (Smith & Pillarisetti 2017). At the same time, expanded access to modern fuels and clean sources of energy is becoming more common, reducing respiratory illnesses and other health problems caused by cooking with solid fuels. LPG, which is seen as a much cleaner burning cooking fuel, was first introduced for domestic use in India in the 1950s (Smith 2017). Since then, the Indian government has continued to subsidized the purchase of LPG. Nonetheless, until recently, it has remained affordable only for the middle-class and overwhelmingly urban households in India. It wasn’t until 2014 that the Indian government addressed the lack of access to clean fuels as both a public and environmental health issue. In 2015, the government along with three state-owned oil and gas companies (IOC, BPCL, HPCL) launched programs to help the rural poor access and purchase LPG as a replacement cooking fuel. Pahal: A direct transfer program that deposits fuel subsidies directly into bank accounts. This was developed partially to help reduce the illicit use of fuel subsidies outside the household cooking fuel sector (Gould et al. 2018). Giveitup: A program that encourages upper- and middle-class households to voluntarily give up their fuel subsidy, with the funds used to expand LPG access to India’s rural poor. More than 10 million Indian households are estimated to have participated in the campaign since its conception (Gould et al 2018). Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY): PMUY also known as Ujjwala is an ongoing initiative that was built on the success of both Pahal and the Giveitup campaigns in expanding LPG access to rural areas (Mittal et al. 2017). The Indian government has aligned PMUY with its voluntary implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Ujjwala has a gender-focused approach to dissemination and seeks to empower women who are traditionally responsible for cooking and disproportionately suffer from the effects of indoor household air pollution due to the use of solid cooking fuels. 7 Launched on May 1, 2016, PMUY set an initial goal of distributing 5 crore (50 million) LPG connections by March 31, 2019. The dissemination strategy moved more quickly than anticipated, and in early August 2018 the initial goal of 50 million LPG connections was met. As of October 18, 2019, PMUY’s official website (http://www.pmujjwalayojana.com/) listed the number of disseminated connections as 56,788,976. The success of PMUY has led to revisions for its target goals. By March 2019, the government aims to have installed 80 million new LPG connections with a budget allocation of US $1.7 billion.