Biogas : Clean Energy Access with Low-Cost Mitigation of Climate Change

Somanathan, E. ; Bluffstone, Randall

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: climate change;    fuelwood;    biogas;    carbon credits;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7349
RP-ID  :  WPS7349

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

With data from the nearly 6,000households in the Nepal Living Standards Survey of 2010–11,this paper finds that the mean reduction in householdfirewood collection associated with use of a biogas plantfor cooking is about 1,100 kilograms per year from a mean ofabout 2,400 kilograms per year. This estimate is derived bycomparing only households with and without biogas in thesame village, thus effectively removing the influence ofmany potential confounders.Further controls for importantdeterminants of firewood collection, such as household size,per capita consumption expenditure, cattle ownership, andunemployment are used to identify the effect of biogasadoption on firewood collection. Bounds on omitted variablebias are derived with the proportional selection assumption.The central estimate is much smaller than those in theprevious literature, but is still large enough for the costof adopting biogas to be significantly reduced via carbonoffsets at a modest carbon price of $10 per ton of CO2e whenusing central estimates of emission factors and globalwarming potentials of pollutants taken from the scientific literature.