Spain grows more than 750.000 tons of rice each year, mainly in four areas: Andalusia, Extremadura, Valencia and Catalonia, causing as many tons of waste that is generated during its collection. This waste is difficult to collect and manage in the vast majority of farms, some of them being true smallholdings where indiscriminate burning of straw is practiced as the only solution, generating thousands of tons of CO2 emitted, or if not burned, producing in many cases soil contamination, and even emissions of methane into the atmosphere.
Genia has developed a logistics process for collecting waste from agricultural fields, effective for any type of plantation and size, where the straw is collected immediately after the production of the waste, its appropriate storage in the form of silos, with a treatment that guarantees the correct maintenance of the properties of the waste to be managed by anaerobic digestion, to be used throughout the year.
The process developed over years of research allows the correct digestion of a waste with high amounts of silica and lignocellulose fibers, which make it difficult to chop and cause self-ignition during storage. The anaerobic digestion process developed is innovative in the phases and types of bacteria that are used to both break down these fibers and be able to digest practically all of the organic matter in the waste, obtaining a renewable biogas and a high-quality digestate for use. as fertilizer.
Rice farmers throughout the Spanish territory have subsidies recognized by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which requires correct environmental management of the sowing, production, and subsequent harvesting of the tons of rice they generate, with a remuneration for each cultivated hectare. These farmers do not currently have an adequate process to be able to manage this process waste, the straw that remains in the fields, and which in most cases ends with incineration without any type of recovery, and also causing terrible problems. The lack of alternatives, the timid attempts to valorize straw in other ways (construction, incineration, fertilizer, etc.), have not only been reduced to simple pilots due to the difficulty of treating the waste itself, but also of effective collection, packaging , storage and disposal for the use to which it is dedicated.
The technology of the logistics process, together with the innovative anaerobic process developed by Genia Bioenergy, allows the introduction of this waste. Once machinery adapted for the efficient collection of a complex waste of this type is used, it allows the farmer to create a biogas production plant. , can treat large quantities of rice straw waste, so that a powerful recovery is also obtained in the form of renewable gas (biogas) that can be purified and introduced into the gas network for use as a neutral fuel by any user of the national gas network.
More info
