The Enugu State Government has designed and produced an innovative green energy and safe cooking stoves meant to secure Nigeria and Africa from deforestation and ecosystem losses.

The stove, which is known as Enugu Stove, is designed 100 per cent local content and meant to use smokeless and odourless coal briquette to produce heat for cooking.

The state’s Commissioner for Innovation, Science and Technology, Dr Lawrence Eze, disclosed this to newsmen in Enugu on Tuesday.

Eze said the innovative stove, whose design was fabricated by Scientific Equipment Development Institute (SEDI), remained unique due to its human and environmental safety features.

He noted that with the stove, days of gas explosion and explosion from adulterated kerosene use in kerosene-stoves at homes and eateries are over.

According to him, sometimes if there are fatalities, the degrees of body burns from such explosions are unimaginable; and this is the principal thing the stove is meant to solve. He explained that the stove has two chambers, adding that the burning chamber is well-insulated from the outer chamber even when the heat and cooking is ongoing.

The commissioner said on economic benefit, the stove is a one-off (one time) buy and the coal briquette, which would be a recurring buy, is cheap and got from purified and dehydro-carbonised coal that Enugu is blessed with.