Energy and Environmental Engineering 2(1): 20-30, 2014 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/eee.2014.020103 Life Cycle Energy Analysis (LCEA) of Cooking Fuel Sources Used in India Households Punam Singh * , Haripriya Gundimeda Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, India * Corresponding Author: punam29@gmail.com Copyright © 2014 Horizon Research Publishing All rights reserved. Abstract The purpose of this paper is to analyze various cooking fuel options commonly used in Indian households, namely, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG CO) derived from crude oil and (LPG NG) natural gas, kerosene, coal, electricity, firewood, charcoal, crop residues, dung cake and biogas. In this paper, we used life cycle energy analysis approach to determine the life cycle energy efficiency (LCEE) of cooking fuels. The daily heat energy requirement by the Indian households for cooking activities is about 2150 kcal. Amongst the analyzed fossil fuels, LPG derived from natural gas has the highest energy efficiency of 45% and coal with 14.7% is the least energy efficient fossil fuel option for household cooking. The life cycle energy efficiency of traditional biomass fuels is 11.9-7.5%, which is much lower than those of commercial cooking fuels like LPG and kerosene. The life cycle energy efficiency of charcoal is found to be 9% and is lower than that of firewood. The energy efficiency of biogas is found to be comparable to that of LPG and is potentially a sustainable cooking fuel option in Indian context. Keywords Life Cycle Energy Efficiency, Cumulative Energy Demand, Cooking Energy Demand, Traditional Fuels, Fossil Fuels 1. Introduction Cooking activities can be traced back to the early years of social evolutionary stages of human civilization and continues to be the most fundamental necessity of human society. The pattern of household cooking energy consumption is representative of country’s socio-economic well being. In other words, the accessibility and affordability of cooking fuel options to the households can be said to be a key determinant of economic development and inclusive growth. In India, the most significant aspect of residential cooking energy consumption is the extent of disparity in the energy use between rural and urban areas of the country. While a majority of the rural households depend on traditional cooking fuels such as firewood (62.5%), crop waste (12.3%) and dung cake (10.9%), a large number of households in urban areas depend on LPG (65%), kerosene (7.5%) and coal (2.9%) for cooking purposes [1]. The cooking fuel consumption trend in urban areas of past few decades’ show that firewood and coal were the principle energy carriers for cooking until mid 1970’s but gradually kerosene substituted the coal and post liberalization, the consumption of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) has been steadily rising. The kerosene use has been on a constant decline since 1999 and the rate of decline is almost equal to the rate of increase in the LPG consumption. The consumption of firewood, which is largely used by the low income households has remained almost constant since 1991. The consumption of coal has been mostly limited to areas around coal mines and has remained fairly constant at about 3%. In rural areas, firewood and dung cake were the main energy carriers for cooking activities during mid 70’s and continues to be the dominant cooking fuel resource till date. Although the accessibility of LPG has been increasing in rural areas since 1999, but the fuel transition observed is largely from kerosene to LPG. Both LPG and kerosene for the residential sector is disseminated through an aggressive subsidization policy of the Indian government. The fuel type and consumption pattern are also influenced by income levels of the households and various studies have shown the positive relationship between the increase in income to the fuel transition up the energy ladder, i.e. from biomass to kerosene to LPG and/or electricity, in terms of quality, user convenience and cost [2]. The ‘energy ladder hypothesis’ is somewhat skewed, particularly in rural areas where high income households tend to use biomass fuels too along with commercial fuels because of its local availability and taste preferences of certain dishes like unleavened bread, rice dishes cooked in earthen pots etc [3]. Rural households collect fuel from various sources such as animals, forestland or open land surrounding their villages and a considerable amount of time and manual labour is spent in gathering, collection, making, drying, stocking etc of biomass fuels [4-5]. The direct consequences for the poor are that precious time is lost in collecting low quality and low efficient fuels, thereby reducing their ability to accumulate the financial resources they need to invest in strategies for improving their