Laila Padi 'Waste' Found to Have Great Potential as Biofuel
by Ubaidillah Masli (Brunei Times) LAILA, the rice variety heralded as the answer to Brunei’s food self-sufficiency woes, might also fuel the Sultanate’s cars in the future as an efficient and more environment-friendly biofuel. This is the finding of a post-graduate student of Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) researching the feasibility of converting by-products of the national rice into biodiesel.
Once Laila is harvested and milled, the remaining “waste” products of husks, straws and bran are either thrown away, burnt or simply left in the padi fields due to their lack of commercial value. However, PhD student Prabitha Vinodh Kumar believes these so-called waste products can be converted into energy-efficient and eco-friendly biodiesel, which is diesel fuel derived from either vegetable oil or animal fat. As part of her on-going work for her doctorate, Kumar told The Brunei Times yesterday that she has already managed to produce near pure biodiesel from bran oil extracted from the bran of Laila padi.
…”Because Brunei is an oil-rich country, biodiesel is unexploited over here. According to the data, the amount of petroleum is decreasing and the environmental waste is increasing, so it will be a solution to deal with this environmental waste as well as the problem of the decreasing of the petroleum products,” she said.
In her presentation during UBD’s inaugural Graduate Science Student Research Conference at the university’s chancellor hall, Kumar said that Brunei had 17 years’ worth of crude oil reserve and 30 years of natural gas reserves, citing statistics of a study carried out this year by the country’s think-tank, the Centre for Strategic and Policy Studies. READ MORE
