Carbon Neutral Commons' full time consultant and advisor, the award-winning Filipino engineer Professor Alexis Belonio, has been working for CNC since March 2014 to develop best-in-class gasification technology. First introduced to CNC by Dr. Paul Olivier, Belonio is an expert in biomass conversion to energy, post-harvest engineering, agricultural machinery design, development, and manufacture and the utilization of non-conventional energy sources.
With CNC Belonio has been improving his domestic rice-husk cookstove with the mandates listed below, as well as creating gasification technology that transforms rice husk into syngas for small-scale electrical generation. At present, he is working on a system of industrial processing of rice straw so it can be a viable feedstock for the gasification process.
These technologies are the backbone to using the untapped energy potential of agricultural residue while sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere. Once proved and tested through field work, we hope the economic viability of these technologies will lead them to be widely adopted throughout the rice-farming areas they were designed to serve.
Professor Belonio's mandate includes these points:
Optimizing the quality of the byproduct char for carbon recalcitrance: molar ratio H/C (max Carbon)
Minimizing levels of PAHs in the char (min Polycyclic hydrocarbons)
Minimizing emissions (min emissions)
Maximizing robustness (max robustness)
Maximum energy output (max energy)
User friendliness (max usability)
