Rice husk, bagasse and the logistics that decide a biomass plant

The two largest agricultural residues in the Philippines are rice husk and sugar-cane bagasse. Both are burned in boilers already. Both are also the fuels that most often defeat a feasibility study, and the reason is never the calorific value. It is the map and the calendar.

Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.

Rice husk

Husk is about a fifth of the weight of paddy. At a national harvest of about 20 million tonnes of paddy, the country produces roughly 4 million tonnes of husk a year. It arrives at the mill dry, at around 10% moisture, with a heating value near 13 megajoules a kilogram and an ash content near a fifth, almost all of it silica. It is easy to burn and awkward to handle: a bulk density of around 100 kilograms a cubic metre means a lorry carries air.

The consequence is that a husk plant lives at a mill or between several. A 10 MW plant needs on the order of 100,000 tonnes a year, which is the output of a cluster of large mills, and collecting it from beyond thirty or forty kilometres costs more in diesel than the fuel is worth.

Bagasse

Bagasse is about 28% of the cane by weight and leaves the mill at 50% moisture, with a heating value as fired of 7 to 8 megajoules a kilogram. It is burned in the mill's own boilers to make the steam the mill needs, and a modern high-pressure boiler makes enough surplus to export power. The catch is the calendar: milling runs from around October to May, and for the other months the boiler either stops or burns something else.

The three questions

Where is the fuel, and who owns it once it leaves the mill?

When does it come, and what fills the months when it does not?

What does the plant do with the ash?

The answers decide whether a plant is a cogeneration unit at one mill, a merchant plant in a milling district, or a study that stays on the shelf. Husk ash sells to cement and steel; bagasse ash goes back to the field. Both are worth putting in the model.

We have built plants on both fuels: a rice-husk plant in Nueva Ecija and a bagasse cogeneration unit at a sugar mill in Negros. The pages for rice mills and sugar mills and distilleries set out what each involves.

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.