Abstract:

Burning of biomass for cooking is associated with health problems and climate change impacts. Many previous efforts to disseminate improved stoves – primarily by governments and NGOs – have not been successful. Based on interviews with 12 organizations selling improved biomass stoves, we assess the results to date and future prospects of commercial stove operations in India.

Specifically, we consider how the ability of these businesses to achieve scale and become self-sustaining has been influenced by six elements of their respective business models: design, customers targeted, financing, marketing, channel strategy, and organizational characteristics.

The two companies with the most stoves in the field shared in common generous enterprise financing, a sophisticated approach to developing a sales channel, and many person-years of management experience in marketing and operations. And yet the financial sustainability of improved stove sales to households remains far from assured. The only company in our sample with demonstrated profitability is a family-owned business selling to commercial rather than household customers. The stove sales leader is itself now turning to the commercial segment to maintain flagging cash flow, casting doubt on the likelihood of large positive impacts on health from sales to households in the near term.

Executive Summary

Natural gas can offer substantial environmental, energy security, and convenience advantages over competing fuels such as coal and oil.   Gas is relatively abundant in the world, but the adoption and use of gas are hindered by its requirement for costly transport infrastructure. Because the pipelines or liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities for moving gas are expensive to construct, investors depend on many years of reliable operation to recover their upfront capital outlays. Moreover, as gas cannot be stored as easily or cheaply as oil, governments must ensure that these expensive pipelines and LNG facilities will find consumers who are willing to pay prices for gas sufficient to enable long-term cost recovery. Bringing new gas to market thus means solving a high-stakes coordination problem that spans the upstream (development of the gas field itself), midstream (construction of transport infrastructure), and downstream (provision of gas to end use customers and ensuring consumer demand) parts of the gas value chain.

In their use of price subsidies to stimulate domestic gas demand, governments have in a number of cases deterred the development of gas supply and created shortages. At the same time, full price liberalization tends to face political resistance from domestic consumers of gas. Some governments have finessed this issue by creating markets with both planned and liberalized components.   Another challenge faced by gas-rich governments is how to mitigate risks faced by both prospective gas suppliers and prospective gas consumers in a nascent market, especially given the need to build and pay for costly gas transport infrastructure. In this paper, we discuss ways that governments can manage a delicate balancing act on gas, providing a predictable investment climate and regulatory framework to foreign investors while at the same time developing and serving a robust domestic market for gas. 

As the world's fifth largest coal exporter and a key swing supplier between the Atlantic and Pacific coal markets, South Africa is a crucial player in global markets.  While the country has long been Europe's major supplier of coal, South African exports have begun to shift east and are steadily becoming a major source of coal supply for the Asian coal boom.  This strategic positioning sets the stage for South Africa to become an even more important player in determining how the world trades and prices coal. 

In the coming decade South Africa will face a number of difficult decisions around how to meet increasing domestic coal demand while dealing with climate concerns, increasing exports, and building the infrastructure that would enable the country to significantly expand market share in the global coal trade.  In many ways, the fate of South Africa's coal sector now hangs in the balance.

This paper explores the interplay between South Africa's domestic and export thermal coal markets and what might shape their development in the future. The paper first examines the industrial organisation and political-economy of the coal sector in South Africa.  An overview is provided of coal mining companies, how the current market structure emerged historically, the development of rail and port facilities, and coal costs and prices. Policy and legislative developments are also described. Finally scenarios are developed for local and export coal markets.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is now widely viewed as imperative for global climate stabilisation. Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel, and coal combustion is now the largest single source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

China’s coal sector is the world’s largest and the rapid industrialisation of China is inexorably tied to the same process that fuelled the West’s development - burning coal. International Energy Agency (IEA) projections suggest that China will have 1,332 gigawatts (GW) of coal power generation capacity by 2030, compared to 583 GW in the US and EU combined.