As the world shifts its gaze to a potential carbon emission-free future, efforts have been made to mitigate the burning of agricultural waste. The burning of agricultural waste has a huge impact on global climate change, contributing to huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. In addition, farmers would rather incinerate their agricultural residues than pay for disposal costs.

A major contributor to carbon emissions is rice farms, due to their high output per harvest. Rice straws left from the residues of harvest are found to have a relatively high biogas potential, due to the abundance of sugar subsidiaries available. Biogas can be used as fuel in boilers and to power electrical grids, with upgrading increasing its viability to be used as vehicle fuel.

In Thailand, rice exports play a huge backbone in the economy, producing approximately 26.1 megatonnes (Mt) of rice straw annually with 80% of farmers willing to bale and sell rice straws.

With the versatility and quantity in potential feedstock, this paper discusses the conversion of rice straw to biogas via anaerobic digestion (AD), with the potential in enhancing biogas into more value-added products like bioethanol. In addition to assessing the economic feasibility and sustainability of the process.