Health and social impacts of biomass gasification for household energy in rural China: Assessment from three perspectives and emergent insights from their synthesis

Solid fuels such as coal, wood, and crop straw supply some fraction of household cooking and heating fuel for more than one billion people in China. As these fuels do not generally combust cleanly in household stoves, their use levies large health and environmental burdens, particularly in rural regions. Production of clean-burning fuels from agricultural residue offers one prospect for mitigating health and social burdens imposed by household use of solid fuels.; This dissertation explores the question: how might production of clean-burning household fuels from agricultural residues affect human health and social conditions in rural China? I approach this question from three perspectives.; First, a technically plausible but currently unproven village-scale energy technology is explored in a scenario bounded by natural resources and substantiated by engineering specifications, estimates of indoor exposures to air pollution, and epidemiological analyses. This analysis asks at the national (China) level: how might rural health burdens be mitigated and greenhouse gas emissions reduced by such a technology?; Secondly, I perform wintertime indoor air quality monitoring in a Chinese village where coal and wood are used for heating and a variety of solid and "improved" fuels, including gas and electricity, are used for cooking. This fieldwork characterizes rural indoor air quality in terms of 24-hour and peak-period (1-hour) carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matter (PM) concentrations and 24-hour airborne nicotine (a proxy for environmental tobacco smoke), as well as daily exposures of primary cooks to CO. I also explore relationships between observed measures of indoor air quality and investigate household structural and behavioral factors as determinants of air quality.; The third perspective is an ethnographic case study of a demonstration project for production of household fuel from agricultural residue in Hechengli Village, Jilin Province, China. With an emphasis on rural residents' and local leaders' perspectives, this field research clarifies local social, economic, and environmental dimensions of the energy project. I consider broader implications for similar rural projects as well as institutional reception of these particular findings. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...