Rice Husk Power Generation Potential in Casanare, Colombia: A Production-to-Mill Spatial Assessment

Abstract

Colombian energy planning increasingly treats residual biomass as a resource to be mobilised through territorial infrastructure, yet the national biomass inventory that still anchors regional estimates rests on agricultural data from 2006 -roughly two decades old- and departmental tonnage figures cannot indicate where a residue is generated or how much remains available for energy use. This study estimates the rice-husk electricity potential of Casanare, Colombia's leading paddy producer, through a spatially explicit and updatable framework based primarily on public data and calibrated against primary weighbridge records from one mill. A four-level traceability chain separates origin-based theoretical potential, milling-based generation, availability-adjusted potential, and technical electricity potential. Municipal paddy production is allocated to a verified inventory of milling nodes through an attractiveness-weighted spatial-interaction model, with nearest-neighbour and pure-distance specifications retained as structural bounds. Under the central parameter set, the gross technical electricity potential is 24.3 GWh/year (a mean output of 2.78 MW) with a spatial band of 19.0–32.5 GWh/year and an interannual band of 20.6–26.9 GWh/year. The assessment also finds that the mill-level data needed to validate such estimates are already collected under existing reporting obligations but are not publicly available in aggregate.