Enhanced Rice Straw Biogas

Rice straw is the third largest biomass resource in the world, after sugar cane bagasse and maize stover. Unlike rice husks (that cover the grain and are taken to rice mills), rice straw gets left in the field after harvest and few major uses have been identified for it, so across Asia more than 300 million tonnes of it are simply burned each year as waste. To date, attempts to profitably collect and use it for clean energy have almost all failed. In 2013, Craig Jamieson brought together and led a team of scientists from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in their Philippines headquarters and the Supergen Bioenergy Hub in the UK to better understand why such a vast resource is being wasted. The IRRI-SUPERGEN "Rice Straw Energy Project" ran for 3 years, funded under the UK Government. When that project ended in 2016, Craig then started Straw Innovations Ltd with co-funding from Energy Catalyst Round 4. A pioneering 1000m3 test facility has been set up in the Philippines, led by Straw Innovations, with support from the Supergen Bioenergy Hub (Aston University), University of Southampton and QUBE Renewables. That 3-year, "mid stage" project ends in February 2020, so this second "mid-stage" project will continue and extend its work, focusing on three key innovations:

Trialing a novel way to harvest rice grains and straw simultaneously using a different design of combine harvester and adaptating it to capture the straw. This will be lower cost than current harvesting options and will save farmers problems with straw management by removing it free of charge
Using biological pre-treatments and biochar addition to accelerate biogas production at lower cost than current state of the art
Using heat from the straw to dry rice for the farmers, reducing losses and enabling it to be sold later at a higher price, sharing those profits with the farmers
These innovations will halve the cost of rice straw bioenergy production, making it available to rice farmers in a new business model, ready for scaling up. There are 150 million small-scale rice farmers globally and this approach could convert a ubiquitous waste into a source of clean, reliable and affordable energy for their productive and domestic use.