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Use of rice crops waste for energy production in Ecuador

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-06-22, 10:16 authored by Ricardo A. Narvaez-Cueva, Richard BlanchardRichard Blanchard, Alfredo Mena
The purpose of this paper is to assess the feasibility of energy production from rice husk in the Province of Los Ríos, located in Ecuador. The overall aim is to determine the most convenient energy generation technological path, considering the amount of resource available, between direct biomass burning for heat production and electricity (on-grid) production through steam turbine usage, pyrolysis gasification and plasma gasification, together with silica gel recovery from the rice husk ash. The decision is made based on the technology state of the different options, the energy production rate and the financial analysis which has a scope of ±30%. This purpose requires developing a basic process design with output streams forecast, cost estimation and financial analysis for each one of the options analyzed. A survey identifies three zones in the study area where rice resource is concentrated with the potential to develop and install suitable power plants. The pyrolysis gasification technology presents the most promising solution and a scenario including silica gel recovery increases the profitability of potential projects in all cases.

Funding

The authors are grateful to the National Secretary of Superior Education, Science, Technology & Innovation of Ecuador (SENESCYT) for sponsoring the master study related to this project and the development of this work. The Energy Researching Corporation in Ecuador (Corporación para la Investigación Energética, CIE) for assisting during this project and the EUREC Agency, Belgium, Master program.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Energy and Power

Volume

3

Issue

3

Pages

27 - 36

Citation

NARVAEZ, R., BLANCHARD, R. and MENA, A., 2013. Use of rice crops waste for energy production in Ecuador. Energy and Power, 3 (3), pp.27-36

Publisher

© Scientific & Academic

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2013

ISSN

2163-159X

eISSN

2163-1603

Language

  • en

Location

Ecuador