Intervention
Clean fuels
Part of: Source control
Also: clean fuel, clean cooking fuel, clean cooking energy, fuel switching, modern energy
Household fuels and electric appliances that produce little or no particulate emission at the point of use — electricity, liquefied petroleum gas, piped natural gas, biogas, ethanol and solar. The category is defined by what reaches the room, not by how the energy was produced.
What it is
Switching fuel is source control in its strongest form: instead of burning better or venting the smoke, the household stops producing it. It is the single change that reliably moves kitchen concentrations from hundreds of micrograms per cubic metre towards the range outdoor air sets.
Two qualifications keep the term honest. Clean is defined at the point of use — an electric hob emits nothing in the kitchen whatever fuel the power station burned — so the phrase describes an exposure, not an environmental balance. And the gases in the category are not emissionless: a flame still makes nitrogen dioxide, which is why an extracting range hood belongs with them.
The hard part is not the switch but the staying switched. Households that acquire a clean fuel often keep the old stove for some tasks, and the exposure that remains is proportional to how much cooking still happens on it.
What the studies report
| Linked to | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | mean 30.7 | — · bedroom | cluster-randomised trial of indoor cooking with liquefied petroleum gas against traditional cooking: fine particulate matter measured in the bedrooms of intervention and control households, with entomological outcomes measured alongside | F-1570 Effects of indoor cooking with liquefied petroleum gas versu… (2025) | machine |
| Carbon monoxide (CO) | median 0.52 | — · personal exposure of pregnant women | multi-country randomised controlled trial in pregnant women (HAPIN): households were assigned a liquefied petroleum gas stove and fuel, an improved biomass stove, or usual cooking, with personal carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter measured after the intervention | F-1777 A cluster randomised trial of cookstove interventions to imp… (2021) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | median 45 | — · personal exposure of pregnant women | multi-country randomised controlled trial in pregnant women (HAPIN): households were assigned a liquefied petroleum gas stove and fuel, an improved biomass stove, or usual cooking, with personal carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter measured after the intervention | F-1779 A cluster randomised trial of cookstove interventions to imp… (2021) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | difference 43 | — · laboratory cookstove test | laboratory combustion tests of fuel cakes made from cow dung and groundnut shell in four blends (C1 100 % cow dung to C4 25 % cow dung and 75 % groundnut shell) in a rural cookstove: calorific value and emissions of PM2.5, CO2 and formaldehyde | F-0353 Feasibility of cow-dung groundnutshell composite as a decent… (2026) | machine |
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | difference 29 | — · laboratory cookstove test | laboratory combustion tests of fuel cakes made from cow dung and groundnut shell in four blends (C1 100 % cow dung to C4 25 % cow dung and 75 % groundnut shell) in a rural cookstove: calorific value and emissions of PM2.5, CO2 and formaldehyde | F-0354 Feasibility of cow-dung groundnutshell composite as a decent… (2026) | machine |
| Formaldehyde (CH₂O) | difference 53 | — · laboratory cookstove test | laboratory combustion tests of fuel cakes made from cow dung and groundnut shell in four blends (C1 100 % cow dung to C4 25 % cow dung and 75 % groundnut shell) in a rural cookstove: calorific value and emissions of PM2.5, CO2 and formaldehyde | F-0355 Feasibility of cow-dung groundnutshell composite as a decent… (2026) | machine |
| Formaldehyde (CH₂O) | fuel blend filed under clean-fuels; laboratory test, not household exposure | — · laboratory cookstove test | laboratory combustion tests of fuel cakes made from cow dung and groundnut shell in four blends (C1 100 % cow dung to C4 25 % cow dung and 75 % groundnut shell) in a rural cookstove: calorific value and emissions of PM2.5, CO2 and formaldehyde | F-0356 Feasibility of cow-dung groundnutshell composite as a decent… (2026) | machine |
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | median 507.0 | households cooking at home · kitchen | cross-sectional household survey of 280 randomly selected households in Jimma town, Ethiopia (140 solid fuel, 140 clean fuel/electricity): real-time PM2.5, PM10, CO, CO2 and VOC measured in the kitchen during cooking for 30 minutes to one hour with portable monitors, compared by fuel, kitchen configuration, ventilation and stove type with Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests | F-0507 Household Air Pollution Related to Housing Characteristics a… (2024) | machine |
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | median 513 | households cooking at home · kitchen | cross-sectional household survey of 280 randomly selected households in Jimma town, Ethiopia (140 solid fuel, 140 clean fuel/electricity): real-time PM2.5, PM10, CO, CO2 and VOC measured in the kitchen during cooking for 30 minutes to one hour with portable monitors, compared by fuel, kitchen configuration, ventilation and stove type with Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests | F-0510 Household Air Pollution Related to Housing Characteristics a… (2024) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | median 99.00 | households cooking at home · kitchen | cross-sectional household survey of 280 randomly selected households in Jimma town, Ethiopia (140 solid fuel, 140 clean fuel/electricity): real-time PM2.5, PM10, CO, CO2 and VOC measured in the kitchen during cooking for 30 minutes to one hour with portable monitors, compared by fuel, kitchen configuration, ventilation and stove type with Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests | F-0512 Household Air Pollution Related to Housing Characteristics a… (2024) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | median 119.70 | households cooking at home · kitchen | cross-sectional household survey of 280 randomly selected households in Jimma town, Ethiopia (140 solid fuel, 140 clean fuel/electricity): real-time PM2.5, PM10, CO, CO2 and VOC measured in the kitchen during cooking for 30 minutes to one hour with portable monitors, compared by fuel, kitchen configuration, ventilation and stove type with Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests | F-0514 Household Air Pollution Related to Housing Characteristics a… (2024) | machine |
| — | prevalence 44.3 | — · home | cross-sectional household survey of cooking fuel use and fuel switching: primary and secondary fuels, cooking time and reasons for switching recorded by interview | F-1760 Cooking Fuels in Lagos, Nigeria: Factors Associated with Hou… (2018) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Clean fuels. Coridum Knowledge G-0128, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0128/