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Executive Summary
ice straw is a vast biomass resource in Asia, amounting to more than 500 million tonnes
produced per year. Most of it is burned in fields as a waste product, causing harm to the
environment and human health. If, instead, this could be successfully converted into a
clean-burning fuel, it could become one of the largest bioenergy resources in the world. However, it is important to understand the full range of technical and nontechnical barriers to fulfilling
this bioenergy potential. This document highlights those barriers and latest developments that
could help overcome them. It also summarises analyses that were made of the social and environmental factors in making biogas from rice straw, showing benefits and potential trade-offs.
Business models have also been analysed, along with the implementation and effectiveness of
support from government policies across Asia. Key outcomes are condensed into this report to
help guide future efforts in this important but under-researched field.
BARRIERS
The four key barriers to using rice straw for energy highlighted in this report follow:
TECHNICAL BARRIERS
A. Logistics of straw collection and storage
Conditions are often wet in irrigated rice fields; to save weight, combine harvesters do not have
baling machines and leave straw scattered across the fields. Straw must then be collected separately, often when there are labour shortages, and it is a bulky material that is cumbersome to
handle. Then there are challenges due to poor rural transportation infrastructure and the need
for storage.
NONTECHNICAL BARRIERS
C. Business challenges
In addition to these technical barriers, there are risks associated with sourcing straw from large
numbers of small-scale rice farmers, such as high transaction costs and the need for farmer
cooperation. These combine to result in few commercial attempts at using rice straw for energy.
Hence, there is a lack of proven business models, a lack of training, skills and knowledge, and
a high risk of failure. These in turn lead to difficulty in accessing funding and few commercial
attempts, reinforcing the vicious cycle.
D. Policy failures
Major policy issues include a lack of effective policy support or enforcement (e.g., many countries
ban straw burning without providing alternatives), a lack of effective strategy or environmental
accounting to discourage emissions, and widespread subsidies for fossil fuels.
TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS
1. Logistics
Mechanised collection
Collecting rice straw is still a major challenge in the supply chain. One option to reduce the straws
volume and thus transportation and storage costs is to compress it into bales. However, with the introduction of combine harvesters that tend to scatter the rice straw in the field, collecting rice straw has
become even harder and more costly. Rice straw collection and baling technologies are still not mature,
but related IRRI studies1 of their techno-economic and GHG emissions have shown that
They can reduce labour requirement by 90%.
Total energy consumption required accounted for 10-17% of the total input energy of using the
collected straw for biogas production and caused GHG emissions of 60-165 kg CO2 equivalent
per tonne of collected straw due to fossil fuel use in collection.
The cost of straw collection ranged from US$12 to $18 per ton of straw in the Mekong Delta of
Vietnam, accounting for 10-20% of the total investment cost of biogas or mushroom production; net profits of mushroom production were $123 ($14) per ton of straw used.
Mechanized rice straw collection can be feasible to help avoid in-field burning and generate
additional income in rice-producing areas.
Including CORIGAP and BMZ-rice straw project and reported in Nguyen et al (2016)
Chopping type
Advantages
Disadvantages
Rice straw
hammer mill
(German)
Free-joint hammer
mill, no cutting
plate
High capacity
Knife-rotor in
reversing-rotary
drum-cage
Fixed-joint hammer
mill (shearing of
straw)
High capacity.
Rotary-blade
chopper (Taiwan)
Rotary-knife
chopper with
mechanical
sharpener (IRRI
design)
Airborne dust
pollution.
Lower capacity.
Low capacity
In addition to the mechanical pretreatments outlined above, biological pretreatment options exist that
could be used prior to anaerobic digestion in particular. Fungi are able to break down organic matter
and certain types of mushroom can be grown on rice straw as a commercial crop. Research from the
SubProM project at Can Tho University, Vietnam / Aarhuus University, has shown that, after one crop of
mushrooms, rice straw is more easily digested to make biogas and still gives yields similar to those of pig
manure. Therefore, initial experiments were conducted to try to increase the eciency of mushrooms as
a pretreatment for anaerobic digestion as well as being an additional revenue stream. There is potential
for further work on this and other cascading uses of biomass, such as duck or other livestock bedding,
prior to end use as fuel and fertiliser. Potential also exists for further work to evaluate which pretreatments, if any, are cost-eective for rice straw prior to anaerobic digestion in a range of scenarios.
b. Energy conversion technologies (combustion & anaerobic digestion)
With such a challenging material, and in the face of the numerous barriers to its use as fuel, there was a
need to focus on just a small handful of solutions. The study did not look deeply into new and emerging
technologies, such as second-generation transportation fuels, because these face technological barriers
of their own. To combine those with the challenges of rice straw would create a multiplier eect. Hence,
for this research, the focus has been on technologies that are already commercialised so that the main
thrust could be on how specific challenges for rice straw might be overcome. The two main commercial
technologies, therefore, are combustion and anaerobic digestion. Tables 2 and 3 show the summarised
comparisons of technical options for rice straw, based on combustion and anaerobic digestion, respectively, highlighting the relative advantages and disadvantages of each technology.
Table 2. Comparison of thermal processing options (actual and proposed) for rice straw.
Options
Characteristics/advantages
Disadvantages
Low eciency
High capacity
High cost
Environmental pollution
IRRI rice straw furnace (testing
stage)
Low cost
Characteristics
Continuous AD
farm scale, as
demonstrated by
Can Tho University,
VN
Batch ADfarm
scale, cement
digester, Punjab Agricultural University
Batch ADfarm
scale, as demonstrated at IRRI
Advantages
Disadvantages
Rice straw floating in digester hampering decomposition and gas generation. Clogging.
Small capacity
Testing ongoing
High capacity.
Dynamic stirring
system increases
digestion.
2. Policy solutions
Open burning of rice straw is a major cause of air pollution in rice-producing nations, with serious implications for human health and the environment. Alternative practices can reduce these impacts and
are already carried out at a smaller scale. However, they have been largely ignored by the policy and
research communities until recently, and barriers to deployment are significant. Seven of the worlds
leading rice-producing countries were studied to assess the levels of ambition and implementation of
policies to reduce open field burning and support energy use of rice straw.
140
90
130
80
120
110
70
100
90
60
80
50
70
60
40
50
40
30
20
30
20
10
10
0
China
India
Vietnam
Indonesia
Bangladesh
Thailand
Series 2
Philippines
Series 3
Sixty expert respondents were asked to score the relative importance of the indicators for enabling
alternative straw management practices by distributing 100 points among the indicators of each
criteria-group. Figure 1 illustrates the results.
National policy areas
have been graded
on a 5-point scale: a
score of 0 represents
the absence of
relevant policy and
5 represents highly
supportive policies.
Table 1 details the
thresholds for each
verifier scale.
Fig. 1. Experts rating of the importance of areas of government intervention to
increase the sustainability of management of rice straw. Ratings are relative so
absolute scores are not presented.
10
3
4
0
Bangladesh
Philippines
Vietnam
Indonesia
3: Strategy in
development
4: Strategy
in place but
no targets or
monitoring
5: Strategy in
place with targets & delivery
0: None
1: ASEAN
agreement
India
ban with
widespread
enforcement
sources
burning
implemented
recommending
standards &
monitoring but
no strategy
2: Year-round
regional ban
ban with very
low enforcement
0: None
1: Regional
plans
0: None
1: Seasonal
regional ban
Thailand
open burning
China
management
strategy
total supply
costs:
subsidy as a
Fossil fuel
subsidies
3: Tax relief on
equipment
4: Government-funded
micro-credit
5: Subsidies for
projects using
waste resources
0: None
Agri-business
support
Table 1. Identified policy instrument scores for each of the seven study nations.
engagement
5: Diverse
4: Farm visits
uses
mechanisms
5:
mechanisms
sharing
gas support
4: Small-scale
biogas feed-in
3: Small-scale
biomass feed-
0: None
1: Single
project
2: Single project exploring
environmental
impacts
0: None
1: Tax relief on
equipment
2: Biomass
0: None
1: Extension
system only
2: Link between
research & extension system
3: Rural development policy
includes
0: None
1: Regional efforts to reduce
burning
on dangers of
burning
3: Demon-
Straw use
research
Bioenergy
support
sharing
Farmer
engagement
Rice straw management is generally low in terms of policy priorities, with issues such as rural development and poverty reduction taking precedence over environmental concerns. Institutional barriers to
policy development and implementation are significant in most of the study nations, for example, lack
of authority and accountability, as well as corruption. The development of rice straw policy is further
hindered by poor understanding of pollution sources and eects, among both government ocials and
the general public. In some regions, cultural and linguistic barriers limit the ecacy of farmer engagement activities, and can impede access to extension services. The policies that have been enacted in
dierent countries vary considerably in terms of ambition, development, and enforcement:
China, Thailand, and India are the only countries with evidence of top-down planning to
influence rice straw management.
All countries have some form of agri-business support, but this is not always readily accessible, and no provision specifically targeting agricultural wastes was identified.
Bioenergy is the only area for which all seven study nations have legislation.
All nations have invested in research and development on rice straw use, but many of
these initiatives have been ad hoc one-o projects that did not look beyond overcoming
the biochemical barriers to use.
Information sharing is left to agricultural extension systems in every country except Thailand, although China, India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have made specific provisions to
improve this information-sharing mechanism.
All seven nations have attempted to engage farmers with the management of their rice
straw, and China and Thailand have used a variety of continual engagement methods that
have been implemented by multiple institutions rather than just the agricultural extension
system.