Coconut covers about 3.6 million hectares of the Philippines, more than any other crop, and the country is the world's second producer. Every nut leaves a husk and a shell. The shell is a dense, low-ash fuel with a heating value near 18 megajoules a kilogram; the husk is fibrous, bulky and wetter, and there is far more of it. Most of both is burned in open dryers, sold as charcoal, or left in the field.
Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.
The shell
Coconut shell burns like a soft wood with almost no ash and little chlorine, which makes it a boiler operator's easiest biomass. Its established market is activated carbon and charcoal, which set a floor under its price, and copra dryers have burned it for a century. A plant that wants shell as fuel competes with the charcoal trade, and wins only where the shell is already at the site.
The husk
Husk is about a third of the nut by weight and is mostly fibre and pith. The fibre goes to coir where a decorticating mill exists; the pith and the surplus husk go nowhere. As a fuel it is high in volatiles and potassium, which means it burns readily and fouls a boiler that was not designed for it. It is the residue for a plant built around it rather than a supplement for a plant built around something else.
Where the fuel is
Coconut is a smallholder crop, and the residue is scattered across millions of farms. It concentrates at three points: the copra dryer, the desiccated-coconut or coconut-water plant, and the oil mill. A plant at any of those has a fuel supply; a plant that plans to collect from farms has a logistics business with a boiler attached.
What the processors do today
Most processing plants raise steam on bunker fuel or diesel while their own shell and husk pile up outside. The audit question is not whether the residue can be burned, which is settled, but what the site pays for steam today and what it pays to move the residue away. Those two numbers are the case.
The food processing page sets out what a residue-fired steam supply involves at a processing plant.
If your site runs a fuel-fired boiler or produces an organic residue, an energy and waste audit puts your own numbers against this. Tell us about your site and an engineer replies with the data we need. The figures behind each quarter are in the quarterly market brief.
The next step
If you have organic waste or a boiler and want to know what it is actually worth, tell us what the site produces and what it costs you today. An engineer replies with the first step.
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