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Abstract
Open field burning of rice straw regularly contributes to severe air quality issues affecting millions of inhabitants in the city of Ha Noi. We examine how much replacing open field burning by co-firing mitigates local air pollutants and greenhouse gases emissions. We select two coal power plants located in the North of Vietnam as specific examples. Our findings show that co-firing straw in these plants at 5% mixing ratio on heat basis can reduce greenhouse gas emission as well as air pollutant emissions (SO2, PM10 and NOx) from 3% up to 13%. We examined the social value of these emission reductions using external costs factors. The health benefits of improving air quality by disposing of straw at a large coal power plant instead of open field burning are over ten million USD per year. This is the same order of magnitude as the technical costs of co-firing. Greenhouse gas emissions reduction benefits appear smaller.
Highlights
Vietnam’s major crop is rice with annual production of 45 Mt in 2015 [1]
According to Nguyen (2012), 60 to 90% of the rice straw in the rice cultivation areas around Hanoi was burned in open fields, and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from open field burning of rice straw in Red River Delta caused an environmental damage equivalent to 19 to 200 million USD per year, depending on the social value of CO2 [5]
Local air pollutants emissions (SO2, PM10 and NOx) are plotted against the top axis and GHG emission is plotted against the bottom axis
Summary
Vietnam’s major crop is rice with annual production of 45 Mt in 2015 [1]. Rice straw and rice husk are the by-product of rice production. Open field burning is an uncontrolled combustion process. It releases significant amounts of air pollutants beyond CO2, such as CO, SO2, NOx and particulate matter (PM). We look at co-firing technology as an alternative to uncontrolled in-field burning for rice straw disposal. Co-firing biomass such as wood chips, pellets, rice husk or straw is a cost-effective way to increase the renewable energy content of the power generation sector, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. In this text, co-firing will refer to burning rice straw along with coal in a coal-fired power plant.
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