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RESPONSIBLE TECH

Rice-powered stove ignites new hope for

poor farmers
Once thought to be waste, rice husks now can be used as clean,
cheap fuel for developing countries.

Courtesy of Kirsten Holst/Rolex Awards

Tinkerer: Inventor Alexis Belonio created a series of gas stoves that run off rice husks.

By Gisela Angela Telis, Contributor for The Christian Science Montior

December 3, 2008
Alexis Belonio’s obsession with rice husks began in 2003, when rising fuel
prices and heavy dependence on foreign oil slammed his native Philippines
with an energy crunch.

“I saw rice mills throw husks into the rivers,” says the agricultural engineer.
“I started thinking about using them as fuel.”

Mr. Belonio was already an accomplished inventor, having designed over 30

devices ranging from paddy dryers to water pumps for poor Filipino
farmers. So his thinking led him to the cooking stove, an item fraught with
expense and danger in the developing world.

More than a third of the world’s population can’t afford propane or other
petroleum-based cooking fuels, relying instead on biomass such as wood or
charcoal. Most biomass is burned in inefficient stoves that emit soot, smoke,
and toxic fumes.

Belonio envisioned a safer, cleaner, and less-expensive way to cook. Working

largely in isolation and with little funding, he turned rice husks – an inedible
byproduct of milling rice for food – into a bright blue flame.

Inventing the impossible

Turning rice husks into fuel isn’t a new idea: Several cooking stoves invented
for the developing world, such as the Lo Trau (Vietnamese for “rice husk
stove”), can use the agricultural waste. But husks are messy. They tend to
make a smoky, unstable fire and leave a tar-like residue, says Kirk R. Smith,
an environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley,
who specializes in indoor air quality and frequently tests cooking stoves.

Burning husks cleanly enough to rival a propane or butane stove at low cost
was deemed impossible by many stove developers.
“We were sure this couldn’t be done,” says Paul Anderson, a geographer who
has spent the past five years since retiring from Illinois State University
designing stoves for the developing world.

Mr. Anderson worked on his designs with Tom Reed, a former Massachusetts
Institute of Technology chemist. Mr. Reed invented the top-lit updraft (T-
LUD) biomass stove, one of a class of stoves that can “gasify” its fuel. In
gasifier stoves, biomass burns until only charcoal and burnable gases
remain; the gases are separated and ignited, producing a smokeless blue
flame like that of a natural gas stove, leaving only charcoal behind.

In traditional wood fires, these two processes happen together, creating the
familiar yellow, smoky flames. Separating the stages makes for a cleaner,
more controlled burn that has made the technology popular worldwide.

Reed and Anderson burned wood in their T-LUD stoves, but neither
succeeded in gasifying finer agricultural waste. Then, after seeing a Reed T-
LUD stove demonstration at a conference in Thailand, Belonio started
imagining a husk gasifier.

“Nobody told Alexis Belonio you weren’t supposed to do this with rice
husks,” says Anderson. “So he just went off and did it.”
The secret to Belonio’s success is good engineering and adequate air,
Anderson explains. His design includes a small electric or battery-powered
fan that circulates air through the husks, enabling them to burn more
efficiently.

The fan and fuel sit in the bottom of an iron and steel tube more than a yard
long. The tube traps the gases the husks release when they’re lit – mostly
hydrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide – and combusts them at the
burner on top of the tube. Users can raise or lower the flame by changing the
fan speed. When the husks have burned, the remaining charcoal can serve
as a fertilizer for crops.

“This technology is superior to virtually everything else out there,” says

Anderson. “Belonio stimulated me and others to go back and look again at
rice husks and other fine materials.”

Belonio’s stove does have its drawbacks: It requires access to batteries or the
electrical grid, and its $20 price tag is too steep for the poorest potential
users.

“[The cooker] isn’t exciting until it’s affecting the lives of many people and
you can prove that,” says Mr. Smith, noting that Belonio’s stove has not yet
seen widespread testing in the field.

Abundant resources
To millions of people in the world’s rice-rich regions, the stove could offer a
cleaner, cheaper cooking option that recycles an existing waste with little
impact on the environment.

“In Myanmar, I recently visited a mid-size rice mill that was using rice husks
to power the mill, produce electricity for the house, and do the cooking on
four larger stoves,” says Martin Gummert, a specialist for the International
Rice Research Institute. “There were still husks left.”

Mr. Gummert estimates that the world’s 645 million-ton rice harvest in 2007
generated 129 million tons of rice husks. This leaves an abundance of fuel for
Belonio’s stoves, which can wring about 20 minutes of cooking time from one
pound of husks.
Because rice husks are cheap and widely available, running the Belonio
stove costs only 20 cents a day in the Philippines – most of which is the cost
of running the fan. That can save farmers more than $150 a year on fuel
compared with regular stoves.

The stove’s promise hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last month, watchmaker Rolex
named Belonio as one of its 10 exemplary innovators. Belonio says he plans
to use the $50,000 prize to build a stove demonstration and research center
in Iloilo, Philippines. He’s also working with an Indonesian company to
manufacture 30,000 units for distribution – and that, adds Smith, will be the
technology’s ultimate test.

“If people end up using it day in and day out,” he says, “then Belonio’s got it.”

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