SIEMENS

Suwarto’s life is short on luxury but rich in regularity. A 43-year-old farmer, Suwarto begins each day at five every morning in Purwodadi, a small village in Indonesia. That’s when he and his wife begin cultivating their fields. After a two-hour siesta at noon, they continue working until 5:30 p.m., when the tropical sun slowly begins to set behind the banana trees. Suwarto shares the hut with his wife, two children, a cow, and a few goats and chickens that keep the tidy clay floor free of insects. In one corner of the room stands an old television set, and next to that is a bed that the whole family shares. A naked light bulb dangles from the ceiling. Suwarto may not be able to afford much, but he smiles with contentment — after all, he once had a lot less.

“I’m able to save more money now than a year ago,” he says. This improvement is largely due to an inconspicuous cooking device from Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH (BSH) and to the fuel the device uses. Suwarto points toward the family’s makeshift kitchen, which is located behind a woven partition and consists of a chopping board, a few pots, and an old hearth. Next to it stands the “Protos” device, which is connected by a hose to a small tank containing jatropha oil, an odorless vegetable oil that comes from the seeds of the jatropha shrub. “I’ve been cultivating jatropha since May 2010, along with other plants, such as corn and herbs,” Suwarto explains. “I also use the same plot of land to grow trees. Previously, I could only harvest corn.”

To motivate Suwarto to switch from singlecrop cultivation to “agro-foresting,” in which farmers cultivate a mixture of trees and agricultural crops on their fields, Dutch vegetable oil producer Waterland pays Suwarto about 15 U.S. cents per kilogram of his jatropha nuts. If he delivers more than 50 kilograms, he receives two liters of jatropha oil for free. A liter of oil usually costs him about 70 cents and lasts for two weeks. What’s more, he received the vegetable oil cooker from BSH free of charge. All told, Suwarto now earns $120 a month, compared to the $30 Indonesian farmers usually make.

The project run by Waterland, BSH, and the national forest agency is meant not only to bring farmers more prosperity but also to combat deforestation, cope with population growth, and increase the amount of land under cultivation. In Indonesia, the fact that about 50 million people use firewood for cooking is a major problem. Each year, the average family clears an entire hectare of forest — most of the time illegally — simply to prepare their meals.

According to Samuel Shiroff, Protos Project Manager at BSH, this is where the small vegetable oil cooking device might provide a real alternative. As he points out, “25 liters of vegetable oil provide as much energy as 230 kilos of firewood.” Studies have shown that the rate of illegal deforestation in the areas where Protos has been introduced has been reduced by 90 percent. In addition, cultivation of these vegetable oil plants does not compete with the growing of food crops. As Shiroff explains, “The plants may only be cultivated on special fields which are approved by the forestry authority. And jatropha grows readily on poor soil where it is difficult or even impossible to cultivate.”

Back in his kitchen, Suwarto crouches in front of his cooking device. He fills a small preheating bowl beneath the cooker with a little ethyl alcohol and lights it. After a few minutes the oil is hot enough to turn into a combustible gas mixture. Suwarto turns a knob to light the oil vapor, and the device emits a strong light-blue flame. “We’re having sweet potatoes today,” he says cheerfully, and leaves the rest to his wife. Previously, they used wood for the fire, he says. “That took a lot of time and filled our whole hut with smoke.” According to Suwarto, they hardly use their open fire any more — only to cook large meals on special occasions when the Protos cooker alone is not enough. And the air is much better now thanks to the Protos, he adds.

Small Wonder. Indeed, the smoke from a wood fire gives off poisonous substances such as nitric oxides, benzenes, formaldehyde, microfine soot, and other airborne particles. While the permissible limit for these particles in Europe and the U.S. is 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air, the practice of cooking in huts can produce up to 10,000 micrograms. According to the World Health Organization, over 1.6 million people die from indoor air pollution every year. Due to a lack of alternatives, many people still use firewood or kerosene cookers, which are expensive and a fire hazard.

As mundane as the small vegetable oil cooking device may look in Suwarto’s kitchen, it actually represents quite an achievement. Says Horst Kutschera, who is responsible for development at BSH: “We needed 8 years of lab and field tests before we could go into production. Protos is the first cooker worldwide that runs on vegetable oil. Right now we have 1,200 cookers in operation in various projects.”

Kutschera adds that the devices aren’t limited to jatropha oil. They can run on many other vegetable oils — even used frying oil. That was the big challenge during product development, says Kutschera. “Vegetable oils have completely different properties from conventional fuels. They’re also not very combustible — jatropha, for instance, ignites at 260 degrees Celsius, while kerosene burns at 60 degrees.”

Working together with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, BSH engineers first had to identify the device’s ideal operating temperature. If it’s too low, the cooker will switch off; if it’s too hot, the oil congeals into sediments that turn hard as concrete. Says Kutschera, “The ideal temperature for the cooker is between 720 and 800 degrees. In order to achieve this energy density, we developed a device with a special geometry.” The latest version of the device uses about a quarter of a liter per hour. But plans call for producing a smaller and more efficient model in the future — along with more field studies. “The most important thing is to get an idea of people’s practical needs,” Kutschera explains.

Suwarto has some plans of his own. As a pot of hot water simmers on the cooker and his wife prepares the family meal, he reflects on how to further expand his income. “We could use our cooker to prepare additional food, which we could sell,” he suggests. His wife looks at him over her shoulder. She doesn’t look too excited.