RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Charcoal, Biogas, and Liquefied Petroleum Gas as Cooking Fuels in Ghana George Afrane and Augustine Ntiamoah Keywords: cookstove efficiencies firewood global warming potential (GWP) human toxicity potential (HTP) industrial ecology wood fuel Address correspondence to: George Afrane University of Ghana, Department of Food Processing Engineering, Legon, Accra, Ghana. gafrane@yahoo.com c  2011 by Yale University DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2011.00350.x Volume 15, Number 4 Summary Standard life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology has been used to determine and compare the environmental impacts of three different cooking fuels used in Ghana, namely, char- coal, biogas, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). A national policy on the use of cooking fuels would have to look at the environmental, social, and cost implications associated with the fuel types. This study looked at the environmental aspect of using these fuels. The results showed that global warming and human toxicity were the most significant overall environ- mental impacts associated with them, and charcoal and LPG, respectively, made the largest contribution to these impact cat- egories. LPG, however, gave relatively higher impacts in three other categories of lesser significance—that is, eutrophication, freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity, and terrestrial ecotoxicity po- tentials. Direct comparison of the results showed that biogas had the lowest impact in five out of the seven categories in- vestigated. Charcoal and LPG had only one lowest score each. From the global warming point of view, however, LPG had a slight overall advantage over the others, and it was also the most favorable at the cooking stage, in terms of its effect on humans. www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jie Journal of Industrial Ecology 539