The Mekong region’s hunger for coal and other fossil fuels is growing, and millions still burn wood to make charcoal for cooking.

In 2013, it emerged that a third of the forest cover across all five countries in the region had been lost. With continued deforestation, the region is expected to lose another third by 2030 , according to a 2018 WWF report .

According to a 2015 Global Forest Watch report, the rising rate of tree cover loss in the Mekong region was driven largely by logging, the construction of dams and the clearance of forest for the cultivation of commercial crops.

In Cambodia alone, data released by NASA in 2017 showed that only 3 percent of the country still had primary forest coverage, and that 1.59 million hectares (3.9 million acres) of tree cover were lost between 2001 and 2014. Most of the timber that is illegally felled in Cambodia ends up passing through Vietnam, which itself lost 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of forest cover between 2010 and 2015.

With so many crops already grown in the region, and assuming that no forest is cleared for further biomass or biofuel production, the rice-husk briquette industry could have a positive impact on the environment.

The Mekong countries of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam collectively produced approximately 98 million tons of rice last year, according to FAO figures, meaning the potential for rice husks and straw for use as biomass is sizeable; not to mention by-products from other crops such as maize, corn and cassava.

An alternative fuel appropriate across the Mekong

A 2015 report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) looked at renewable energy potential in these five countries, finding that the biomass or biofuel potential was “considerable, reflecting the importance of the agriculture sector for all countries in the region.”

In Cambodia, for instance, using rice wastage could save people from high electricity prices, the ADB said.

“The predominance of rice production in Cambodia contributes to the high availability of rice residues, such as rice husk and rice straw,” the report said. “These residues could be an option for a variety of biomass energy systems.”

In addition, because of the concentration of people “from the Thai border in the northwest to the Vietnamese border in the southeast,” and with that the growth of rice and other crops, “large-scale mills for processing these crops offer the potential for power generation from biomass residues.”

In Laos, the ADB found that “wood and charcoal account for almost 70 percent of primary energy, thus contributing to extensive deforestation.” But given that about 90 percent of agricultural land is used to grow rice, “the potential for biomass energy from rice, maize, sugarcane, and other agricultural residues is high.”

According to Shabbir H. Gheewala, a professor and head of the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Lab at the Joint Graduate School of Energy and Environment in King Mongkut’s University of Technology, Thailand has had an established rice-husk fuel industry for some time, thanks to government incentives such as the feed-in tariff, which guarantees payments for the production of renewable energy.

“Thailand has the Very Small Power Producer (VSPP) and Small Power Producer (SPP) schemes which allow power plants using biomass as the fuel source to sell electricity to the grid with a feed-in-tariff markup … to make it more attractive,” Gheewala told Mongabay. “As rice husk is a product of rice mills, I think the market is already quite well-established here.”Shrestha says he hopes to continue holding workshops across the Mekong region to promote the benefits of homemade briquettes, particularly because, on an anecdotal level, he’s seen that it can be hard for the habit to take hold.

He’s currently looking to take his workshop to Myanmar.

“[T]hose who learned the techniques of briquette making from degradable items have long time stopped the household business, because they find gas locally for cooking, even if it is costly,” he said.

*With additional reporting by Htoo Tay Zar in Myanmar.

Banner image: Rice husks at a briquette-making factory in Myanmar. Photo by Victoria Milko for Mongabay..

About the reporter: Lauren Crothers is a New York City-based freelance photojournalist with extensive reporting experience in Southeast Asia. You can find her on Instagram at @laurencro.

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