Charcoal has fuelled Africa's urbanisation. Nearly 200m Africans cook mostly with charcoal, including 27% of urbanites. The share has grown since 1990, offsetting the falling use of firewood; the continent's energy transition has been from one kind of wood fuel to another. Production is still growing by 2% a year.
Tens of millions of people across rural Africa use earth kilns to make charcoal, outnumbering all the world's coal miners. The process involves heating wood under low-oxygen conditions to remove moisture and volatile gases: logs and branches are stacked, covered with grass and soil, and burned for several days, yielding one to two tonnes of charcoal for every ten of dry wood. The carbonisation process emits much more carbon than transporting or burning the finished product.
Wood often comes free because producers harvest from their own land or from forests. Many are farmers who sell charcoal when they need cash; others are businessmen who bring in work teams, distribute chainsaws and pay off a landowner or chief. Vigilantes have attacked charcoal trucks in Kenya and Uganda.
The value of Africa's charcoal trade is thought to be in the tens of billions of dollars, possibly more than Africans make from cocoa or coffee. The money trail often leads to soldiers or officials. The trade is informal and decentralised. Charcoal provides roughly 275 days of work for each terajoule consumed, compared with 95 for electricity and 15 for LPG.
Governments oscillate between licensing and outright bans. Abrupt bans create illicit markets; enforcement becomes a messy negotiation among traders, officials, police, soldiers and residents. In Uganda, where production is banned, charcoal is smuggled across the border before being reimported with a seal from South Sudan.
Liquid petroleum gas is cleaner and in Kenya is exempt from VAT. More than half of urban Kenyans now use LPG as their main fuel. Firms are putting meters on gas canisters so consumers can pay as they go. Burn Manufacturing has stopped selling its charcoal stove model in Kenya and is promoting electric ones subsidised by carbon credits. But in countries like Madagascar or Zambia, where alternatives are scarce, charcoal remains dominant.
In Mabalane district in Mozambique, two-thirds of woodland was affected by charcoal production in the decade to 2018, according to a study by Fernando Sedano, then at the University of Maryland. In some places agriculture is the bigger culprit, as farmers clear land mainly to grow crops and make kilns as they go.
The UN Security Council banned charcoal exports from Somalia because jihadists were making millions selling it to the Gulf, where shisha smokers prize the aroma of acacia wood.
You cannot use your friends and have them too.