Inventor sacrifices family, savings to help world's poor

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — In a makeshift laboratory equipped with little more than a battered chair and a cheap kitchen scale, inventor Rene Nunez Suarez displays the contraption that has become his life's obsession.

It's a stainless-steel cooker that uses about 95 percent less fuel than conventional wood stoves, with minimal pollution. It would seem a can't-miss technology in a country where millions still cook with wood and most forests have been destroyed.

The device has garnered Nunez a prestigious environmental prize. It has earned him a U.S. patent. And it has won fans among some Salvadoran peasants who no longer spend a good chunk of their days hunting for firewood and then inhaling cooking smoke.

It has also wrecked Nunez's marriage, alienated two of his three children and swallowed his life savings. At 61, he lives with his mother to save on rent and drives a 1990 Kia.

Nunez knows some people think he's a fool to have poured $2.5 million of his and his family's money into his project with little to show for it.

"My ex-wife said: 'Man, you are an idiot. Poor people have no money. They are not going to buy your stoves,' " he said. "She was right."

Nunez gambled that the government or nonprofits would finance production of the appliances to distribute to low-income people. But Salvadoran officials so far have shown scant interest. Environmental groups have offered praise but little financial backing.

Nunez wonders if he'd get more respect if he hailed from Silicon Valley instead of this tiny Central American nation, where he toils in obscurity at a small private university. His "Advanced Combustion Laboratory of Menlo Park" — named in honor of Thomas Edison — is a converted storeroom with a single fluorescent bulb. His annual budget is $10,000. Still, he perseveres.

Nunez is convinced his combustion method can save trees and reduce greenhouse gases. He figures the technology can be adapted to any fuel and put to industrial uses such as electricity generation. But saving the planet is secondary to a more personal quest: winning back the love of his kids.

"If I could eliminate those emissions, then my children would be proud of me," Nunez said. "That became the main motive of my invention. To let them know that I was right."

Nunez married into one of the most powerful families in El Salvador, for whom he designed industrial equipment. They helped him start his own small business building computer voltage regulators and power supplies. He drove a Range Rover and piloted a Piper Dakota plane. Why risk it all on a stove for the poor?

Intellectual curiosity is part of it. So are hubris and naiveté. Then there are the words of the eccentric 20th-century inventor Nikola Tesla, one of Nunez's idols: "Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity."

It started in the mid-1990s when a friend asked Nunez to write a chapter on energy resources for a book about El Salvador's natural history. Nunez said he was stunned to find that 65 percent of his nation's 7 million people rely on wood for fuel.

In fact, half the planet cooks and heats much the way their ancestors did using solid fuels, according to the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental think tank.

The environmental and health costs are staggering. Indoor pollution from cooking fires kills an estimated 1.6 million people a year worldwide, mostly women and children.

Deforestation is a major source of carbon emissions and exacerbates both flooding and drought. The problem is particularly acute in El Salvador, whose primary watershed is threatened by deforestation.

It all seemed an appalling waste to Nunez, a tall, aristocratic-looking engineer who speaks English with a vaguely British accent acquired during his student days in northern England.

"I thought: 'Well, if we don't fix that, we are going to convert this country into a complete desert,' " he said.

Petroleum-poor El Salvador has no ready replacement for wood. What was needed, Nunez reasoned, was an ultra-efficient wood-burning cooker.

Environmental groups have been pushing such projects for decades. Most involve the use of low-cost insulating materials such as mud or ceramic.

Nunez dismisses these as "stone-age" technologies. He surmised that the key was a more efficient combustion chamber to get the combination of air and fuel and temperature just right.

With the computer-electronics business fast migrating to China, he decided to ditch that enterprise and reinvent his company to building high-tech wood stoves.

Never mind that his wife wasn't crazy about the idea and the couple had three kids to support. Or that Nunez knew little about combustion. With the help of textbooks and countless experiments, he slowly taught himself and his 10 employees.

Early efforts flopped. An aluminum version of the stove melted into a smoldering heap. In 1997 Nunez came up with a working prototype he dubbed the "Turbococina," or Turbostove. He would spend years perfecting it.

The device consists of a metal work table fitted with two 6-inch high, 6-inch wide stainless-steel cylinders, spaced about a foot apart and rigged with air injectors and electric fans underneath. Finger-sized slivers of wood are fed into small openings in the sides of the cylinders. Pots and pans balance on top of these metal silos, which are essentially raised burners.

At first glance, the cooker looks like a crude science-fair entry. Nunez can't be bothered with aesthetics. He said his stove was really a "reactor" and that its beauty lay within.

The peak temperature in the combustion chamber is about 970 degrees Celsius. Nunez said that was 500 to 600 degrees cooler than that of some industrial combustion processes.

The lower temperature saves on fuel and reduces emissions. But the inventor won't give specifics on how he managed it. "That's my secret," he said, the smile retreating from his face. "It cost me blood and suffering to make that stove. ... I don't want anyone stealing my idea."

Nunez said the Turbococina uses 95 percent less fuel than a typical woodstove. Testing at a Canadian lab showed that emissions of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide were negligible, he added.

Bill Pearson, a research engineer who did the testing, said the Turbococina showed "impressive" energy efficiency. He could not recall that it was tested for emissions, though he said it produced very little visible smoke.

San Salvador environmental economist Diego Salcedo said the stove represented a significant advance. He has been trying to help Nunez land funding for large-scale production of the Turbococina, so far with no success.

He said El Salvador's poor reputation in scientific circles hadn't helped.

"There is always disbelief," Salcedo said. "They think: 'How could a Salvadoran have invented something so wonderful?' "

All Adelina Erazo knows is the Turbococina means less time scavenging for fuel and more money in her pocket. The 33-year-old widow, who lives in the countryside east of the capital, said she no longer rises before dawn to make the 12-mile trek to forage for wood.

That leaves more time to care for her three girls and to earn money selling her thick, chewy Salvadoran-style tortillas. The children are coughing less. Meals can be prepared quickly.

Erazo got the stove two years ago, courtesy of a nonprofit that paid for some field testing of the appliance. Bustling about her dirt-floor kitchen preparing lunch on the device, Erazo said the cooker isn't perfect.

She wishes it had three burners instead of two. She said pots can topple from the cylinders if she's not careful. And when the electricity goes out, she can't use the Turbococina, because it needs the fans to move air into the combustion chambers.

Still, she said has made her life easier. She pointed with satisfaction at a heap of tree limbs piled outside her rickety dwelling, a windfall from a storm. She figured that supply might last as long as 10 months, if she doesn't get robbed. Wood has gotten so expensive and scarce in her area that people steal it from each other.

In 2002, the Paris-based International Energy Agency, through its Climate Technology Initiative, awarded Nunez its Climate Technology Leadership Award for his invention. He received U.S. Patent No. 6,651,645 B1 the following year. But financial success has eluded him.

Green groups aren't lining up as he thought they would to fund his technology. He has won occasional grants to manufacture a few stoves for poor families. A contractor makes them for him for $325. His own company can't do it because he no longer has a company or employees. Nunez is broke.

He said his wife, who declined to be interviewed, took most of the couple's assets as part of a bitter divorce prompted by his obsession with the Turbococina.

A friend pulled some strings to get him a research post at the Universidad Francisco Gavidia after he exhausted his savings on the stove.

Nunez said his daughter and oldest son have broken ties with him because they believe he sacrificed family and fortune for a quixotic dream.

"They think I'm crazy," he said softly. "I have to show them that I'm successful before they'll talk to me again."

Los Angeles Times staff writer Alex Renderos contributed to this report.