Utilization of Bagasse Energy in Thailand

Bagasse, a biomass fuel, is the waste generated by the sugar-making process from sugar cane. Sugar making is one of the most important agricultural-produce processing industries for developing countries in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. As sugar producing plants need electric power and process steam, co-generation using bagasse as an alternate fuel for petroleum has been in use for some time. Thailand recently became one of the largest sugar exporters by enlarging plant capacities and improving equipment, thus reducing its production cost. In addition, the Thai government promotes power generation using bagasse as a means to combat global warming by raising the purchase price of the surplus power. The industry is in the process of further raising the plant capacity, and improving the power-generating efficiency. This will enable a plant to generate more electric power than its in-plant need so that the surplus power can be sold to the commercial grid. It also plans to become a local power supplier during off-season of sugar making by adding a condensing turbine generator. A typical Thai sugar plant of the latest design generates steam of 4Mpa at the bagasse boiler outlet with the temperature of 400°C at 84% boiler efficiency. With the bagasse LHV of 7,540 kJ/kg and that of fuel oil 41, 840 kJ/kg, and taking 90%as oil-burning boiler efficiency, 5.95 kg of bagasse would replace 1 kg of oil. The Kyoto Mechanism defines CO₂ generation by fuel oil as 2.65 kg per liter. Using 0.85for the specific gravity of fuel oil, the amount of CO₂ generation will be 3.12 kg-CO₂/kg. Therefore, CO₂reduction per ton of bagasse in terms of fuel oil will be: 3.12/5.95 =0.524 kg-CO₂/kg-bagasse. As 1 kg of bagasse generates 2 kg of steam, the CO₂reduction of a 100t/h steam boiler will be112,660 ton/year for an annual operation of4,300 hours, as follows. 0.524 × 100/2 = 26.2 t-CO₂/h, 26.2 × 4,300 =112,660 t-CO₂/year. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.