Fueling Change

Congo “Briquette” Trip a Success

Category: Alternative energy | Date: Aug 24 2008 | By: endingcharcoal

Recent donations
Robert here. Wow, you guys are great! A big Congo “Asante sana” to the following people for helping launch the biomass briquette project in North Kivu: Tim O - $100, Christopher P - $100, Ethan Z - $50, Nicholas L - $50, Ian B - $50, and Thomas P - $20. When I told people in Goma and Rumangabo that they’re not alone in this project — that there is a team of people willing to help outside Congo — they were amazed that anyone cared. You have no idea how much these contributions give them (and me) hope that we will succeed. This will enable us to train two more press groups and provide them with two complete press outfits.

The “Mzungu” from Colorado trying to earn some street credentials in Rumangabo

Congo trip
I just got back from a two week trip to Congo where I got to meet all the great people working to save the Virunga National Park. The purpose of my trip was to help get the briquette program up to speed — and to learn the lay of the land and get a feel for how things work in eastern Congo. On my first day, Ephrem and I headed up north to the Kibati checkpoint, where we saw dedicated ICCN rangers confiscating illegal charcoal. Then it was on to Rumangabo and Katale. In Rumangabo, we met with Francky, Charles, and the other members of the briquette team at park headquarters. It was also nice to meet Diddy and Innocent (who got a good laugh when I asked them if they were movie stars - given their appearances with Anderson Cooper). Great progress is being made in Rumangabo — thousands of briquettes are being produced each week. We still need to get our production numbers up, but we’ve made a good start and are cranking out about 6600 briquettes per press per month now. Our goal is to get to 10,000. Looks like we’re going to be constructing a press building operation there with the help of Soderu — a great French NGO that does contract work for the park. This will enable us to eventually start making presses for a fraction of the cost and mean that we can do press repairs onsite.

Anatole from Group d’Action Pour le Droit explains his Goma operation

In Goma, Anatole from Groupe d’Action Pour le Droit, ICCN’s Balemba and Jean Bosco, and I worked on developing a city-wide briquetting program aimed up getting 50 press operations up and running in the next several months — with the eventual goal of 5000 presses in operation in two years. Lofty goals, yes, but with 20% of the southern sector of Virunga being lost to illegal charcoal production in the last year, we have to be ambitious!

Our target market: Odds are every person in this picture burns illegal charcoal coming out of Virunga National Park. Illegal charcoal is everywhere, but an alternative is on its way!

4 Responses to “Congo “Briquette” Trip a Success”

sheryl, washington dc, on 25 Aug 2008

Great news! Glad you’re back to blogging here because with Virginia in London I was worried we’d get no progress reports.

I’m curious to know if the briquettes will work in a larger sort of oven or grill? I can’t seem to locate figures on U.S. annual consumption of charcoal, but I found a news story that states on July 4 - just one day -
“… estimated 60 million Americans fire up their barbecue grills this Fourth of July, they’ll be burning the equivalent of 2,300 acres of forest and consuming enough energy to meet the residential demand of a town the size of Flagstaff, Ariz., for an entire year.” Flagstaff has a population of about 58,000.

Just a thought.

Virginia, on 26 Aug 2008

Wow Sheryl, that sounds terrible. I wonder if fuel briquettes are for sale in the US? You could burn them in your regular barbecue, but they will smoke too much, so it is always better to get a closed stove - Robert bought one for $3 in Boulder….

Judy in CA, on 30 Aug 2008

Dear Robert,
Thanks for your continued amazing work! That area of the Congo is the most populated area of the country right? any chance of actually moving people away from the park area with jobs and housing? Also, I recently saw on a Darfur area documentary that refugees were using solar powered devices to cook but maybe Congo area won’t work for such a stove. It’s easy for us over here with all our convenient facilities to expect Africans to stop burning charcoal when that’s all they have for cooking and heating. It’s really not a choice, but thank you for showing up with alternative fuels! It will make a huge difference and solve this huge problem.
Judy in CA

endingcharcoal, on 01 Sep 2008

Hello all! I posted a comment to Sheryl the other day, but I guess it didn’t take. Briefly, the US charcoal makers have huge economies of scale and could squash us lowly briquette makers. I’m also quite certain they are using waste sawdust, too, so they’re not cutting down the forests for charcoal (they feed off of the ones that do, though).

Judy, solar is a bit of an issue because there is a lot of cloud cover in North Kivu and because it requires people to cook when the sun is out (obvious, I know). My experience is that people are creatures of habit and will resist technologies that require too much change — like cooking dinner mid-day. One never knows, though, you may be on to something. Solar could have a niche. The beauty of the briquettes is they are very inexpensive and don’t even require a stove (although they are more efficient with one). Our target market is DESPERATELY poor and cannot afford much — and there are 100s of thousands of them, so we really have go after inexpensive technolgies.

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