Rotten rice feedstock enters Thai market

Thailand's military government is studying a plan to use rotten rice from state stocks to produce ethanol.

The government is estimated to have lost as much as 400 billion baht (€9.2 billion) in buying and storing 18 million tonnes of rice from farmers at higher-than-market prices in the programme that lasted from October 2011 to February 2014.

'We just launched the idea to ethanol producers and we need to talk to them later to see what we could do to encourage them to produce ethanol from the rice,' says Rangsan Sriworasart, permanent secretary for the Ministry of Finance and a member of the rice inspection committee.

Almost 75% of Thailand's ethanol factories use molasses as a raw material and the remaining 25% use cassava.

Overall ethanol production currently stands at 3.9 million litres per day.