Dong Thap (VNA) – The People's Committee of Dong Thap province on July 18 met with the Ambassador of Kazakhstan to Vietnam to discuss a proposed investment in a plant to be located here that will process 1 million tonnes of rice husks from the Mekong Delta region into electricity and anti-corrosion ferrosilicon compounds.
Kazakh Ambassador Kanat Tumysh said the project aims to promote economic development in the fields of energy, agriculture, and high technology. The plant is expected to use 1 million tonnes of agricultural by-products, specifically rice husks, each year to produce electricity and ferrosilicon compounds/alloys. Raw rice husks will be sourced from four localities in Vietnam, namely Quang Ninh, Can Tho, An Giang, and Dong Thap.
To implement the project, the Kazakh investor will require close coordination among farmers, cooperatives, transport operators, and local authorities in the three Mekong Delta localities of Can Tho, An Giang, and Dong Thap.
The proposed plant site must meet three key criteria set by the investor – convenient access to inland waterways for transporting large volumes of rice husks; proximity to high-voltage transmission lines to feed up to 160 MW of electricity into the national grid; and a location amid the rice husk supply area covering Dong Thap, An Giang, and Can Tho.
The investor also hopes the authorities will facilitate connections with major rice milling companies in Dong Thap so they can reach agreements to compress rice husks to one-quarter of their original volume, into 400kg blocks, making transportation and handling more efficient. In addition, the investor seeks links with shipping companies operating large inland cargo vessels to support raw material transport.
Nguyen Thanh Dieu, Vice Chairman of the provincial People's Committee, said Dong Thap cultivates around 611,000 hectares of rice annually and has 68 rice milling enterprises, producing more than 3 million tonnes of rice and approximately 600,000 tonnes of husks each year.
Of this amount, local rice mills use about 300,000 tonnes of husks annually as fuel for their own operations and to produce biomass pellets supplied to industrial plants in Dong Thap and neighbouring provinces. The remaining volume still needs to be effectively utilised to avoid wasting this valuable agricultural by-product, he noted.
He said that two potential locations are suitable for the proposed plant, namely the 260-hectare Lai Vung industrial park and 49-hectare Dinh An industrial cluster. However, Lai Vung currently has no facility that processes rice husks into high-value industrial products.
Therefore, Dieu assigned the provincial Department of Agriculture and Environment to identify a site that satisfies the investor's three key requirements. He also instructed the Department of Construction to survey available land within industrial parks and clusters to accelerate investment attraction./.
VNA
