Providing Access to Clean Cooking: Good for the Health and the Climate

07/04/2024

Promoting clean cooking is a major challenge when it comes to reducing emissions of carbon and noxious gases in developing countries. In its ambition of supplying energy that is ever-more affordable, sustainable, reliable, and accessible to as many people as possible, TotalEnergies plans to double the distribution of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cleaner cooking in Africa and Asia.

TotalEnergies – Clean cooking LPG Africa

Access to clean cooking: a challenge for the environment, health, and society

Around the world, but mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, 2.3 billion people are still to this day using firewood, kerosene, or coal as their cooking fuel⁽¹⁾. This ancestral practice has harmful effects on the environment, the health of the local residents, and the living conditions of women and children.

In addition to releasing large quantities of carbon emissions, burning firewood and charcoal contributes to local deforestation and emits harmful particles into the atmosphere, which are responsible for nearly 3.7 million premature deaths annually⁽¹⁾. Collecting firewood is a task that generally falls to women and children and acts as a barrier to their emancipation, since it takes time that could otherwise be spent on education, family life, or running a business.

⁽¹⁾ Source: https://www.iea.org/reports/a-vision-for-clean-cooking-access-for-all/executive-summary

What are TotalEnergies' goals in terms of clean cooking?

In response, we have taken on the goal of making access to clean cooking as widely available as possible by promoting LPG as a cooking fuel. Packaged in bottles, LPG remains the best solution for developing clean cooking in regions where the local residents do not have access to an electrical grid. Our goal: to serve 100 million people in Africa and India by 2030.

To make that happen, we plan to double our investments in Africa. We already supply LPG to 11 million households in Africa, i.e. nearly 40 million people in 17 countries and regions without access to an electrical grid. We now plan to expand our LPG activities in Mozambique and Namibia, in addition to those already underway in 2023 in Rwanda and Tanzania. Our goal is also to expand the distribution of LPG bottles in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as India.

The "pay-as-you-cook" model to accelerate the adoption of LPG

LPG is more energy efficient and cost-effective than charcoal, but it does have a cost that dissuades some households from adopting it: the initial price of the deposit, the pressure regulator, the stove, and the refill.

To help remove these barriers, TotalEnergies offers an innovative pay-as-you-cook solution. In this system, the customers buy only as much LPG fuel as they need without having to pay a deposit for the bottle. An Internet-connected meter on the bottle releases only as much gas as needed by the customer, who then pays with a digital wallet. This offer has already been rolled out to 500,000 households in Kenya and is expected to spread to Tanzania and neighboring countries.