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Pan Gen Global announces plan for 12.5 Mgy rice hull and waste straw ethanol plant in Arkansas

June 17, 2008

In Arkansas, Pan Gen Global announced a plan to open a 12.5 Mgy rice straw and hull ethanol plant in Stuttgart or one of several sites in the state. The company said it will produce silicates for microprocessors and photovoltaic cells as a byproduct. The company said that their process was patented in the late 1990s and yields 50 gallons of ethanol per ton of rice hulls, in addition to 440 pounds of silica sodium oxide. Company executives said they expected to open the proposed facility by the end of 2009.

Rice straw background

In China, researchers say that they have developed a process to increase the conversion rate of rice straw into biogas by 65 percent. More than 230 million tonnes of rice straw are left over from harvests each year, but to date rice straw has proved resistant in the conversion process. The researchers pretreated rice straw with sodium hydroxide to increase the results from anaerobic digesters. The scientific team said that three pilot facilities have been built using the technology.

FAO officials noted in Senate testimony that rice prices are going through a bubble phase, noting also that wheat prices have dropped by 50 percent and corn was showing signs of entering a price decline phase. FAO economist Abbassian added that “Rice is an exception. Perhaps one could qualify it as a sort of a bubble. It’s a thin market. We have five exporters. Three of them don’t want to sell anything. Obviously prices go through the roof. But the moment one of them decides to open up the border, perhaps it collapses,” Abbassian said in attributing a 500 percent increase in rice prices due to hoarding.

The EBI lab at Emeryville, CA, using the research efforts of UC-Berkeley, UC- Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , Lawrence Livermore and Sandiais focusing on several areas of research, including feedstocks such as rice straw, switchgrass and Arabidopsis, a plant in the mustard family. The consortium is also looking at termites for their ability to convert cellulose to sugars.

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    Written by Jim Lane · Filed Under Producer News 

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