When a U.S. company seeks to streamline its energy-producing rice hull combustion and conversion process, it relies on a screening vendor for critical assistance.

      With oil supplies stretched tight worldwide, oil recently topping $60 a barrel, and nearly every industrialized nation concerned about global warming, the need for alternative energy sources has never been more critical. Agrilectric, a leading U.S. operator of rice hull combustion power plants, is one company that’s attacking the problem of non-renewable energy in the innovative, entrepreneurial style Americans are famous for.

      Agrilectric, based in Lake Charles, La., is a cooperative group of companies that mills rice, burns traditionally discarded rice hulls to generate electricity and converts the resulting ash into useful products for a range of industries. Through the process, 97,000 short tons of rice hulls are converted into power generation annually. Agrilectric’s 13-mwh unit supplies power generation to its internal processes and an adjacent rice mill, while it sells excess capacity back to the power grid.

      In business since 1984, Agrilectric now transforms the rice hull ash into a valuable product shipped worldwide. The ash is beneficial as a molten steel insulator, a concrete additive, and soil amendment. Its unique characteristics also make an excellent filter aid used in the chemical, wastewater, and swimming pool industries; and numerous U.S. racetracks use ash products as oil absorbents.

      Another Agrilectric company, which markets its renewable combustion/ash processing technology internationally, has expanded the technology with the construction of an 8-mwh electrical generating plant in Brazil.

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