Biobriquette and International Cooperation

Abstract

Biobriquette (Biocoal) is a sort of composite fuel consisting of 70 to 85 percent of coal and 15 to 30 percent of biomass by weight. The coal materials used are over a wide range of coal grades while the biomass used include various woody wastes and agricultural wastes such as bark, saw dust, baggase, rice husk and so on. The mass production technique for Biobriquette without any binder has already been developed through adoption of the high pressure briquetting method with compression only in the roll press technique. Its characteristics as compared with the lumpy size coal can be summarized as follows;
1) It generates very little smoke and the sulfur oxides emission can be significantly reduced by mixing any desulfurizing agent in it.
2) It is excellent in ignitability, combustibility and combustion controllability.
3) It hardly generates clinker during combustion, thus permitting easy ash disposal
4) It is uniform in shape and size, and generates less dust during handling.
International cooperation on Biobriquette technology has been requested by many countries, mainly developing ones. Of these countries, the feasibility studies on Biobriquette were carried out so far in Pakistan and Thailand, and also its cooperation for the alternative energy development project is now being gone to Nepal through JICA. As for its technology transfer MITI is now going through “Green Aid Plan”to the developing countries in order to establish the suppression of air pollution and energy-saving in coal combustion, and the Biobriquette production plant will be constructed at Linyi, China lately in 1995.