Water Hyacinth

[Peter Harper]

Hi All
We are looking for any literature and or information on the use of Water Hyacinth as a biofuel.
Principally the use of harvested WH composted and used for methane production and or dried material to fuel in remote locations in low socio economic communities.

We have found that WH is has increased its abundance in the Asia Region (India and China) with a now limited use as a stock feed, with no use of herbicides and the limitations and or no biocontrol available and mechanical removal beyond the cost of these communities.

What other solutions apart from ones that we have been looking at are available
Obviously the WH is free but difficult to get to in some areas with the ever increasing loss of biodiversity, fish, recreation and in some cases transport, help is needed

Water Hyacinth needs to be re evaluated and put back in the international spotlight
yes there have been good successes in Africa but China and India are lagging behind

[Roger Day]

I don't have any recent information, but there was a nice little book by Keith Lindsey and Hans-Martin Hirt of Anamed (http://www.anamed.net/) including a chapter on WH as a fuel. If you got in touch with them they would probably have an update.

I'm not familiar with WH biocontrol in Asia, but as you say, in Africa there have been successes, using various different agents. If WH is becoming a problem again, one would need to find out why, and then perhaps look for additional biocontrol agents if necessary (there are some which have been tested but not yet released). Although biocontrol is not incompatible with utlisation of WH for fuel or other uses, if biocontrol reduces the population of the weed, harvesting/utlisation costs become higher. So if WH is having detrimental effects such as those you mention, utilisation is probably not going to be the best answer.

[Stephen Klaber]

Eradication only works with small isolated infestations.  You WILL be fighting it again.  That requires a profit somewhere.  China will catch up quickly.  Their anaerobic digestion equipment does handle WH well according to a recent article from Bangladesh.  They are the experts on the other part of this picture: the use of massed manpower.

[Stephen Klaber]

In Bungoma Kenya, my colleague Salim Shaban is making fuel briquettes from WH and garbage, burning them in the new low-pollution stoves that produce charcoal as a byproduct, and using the charcoal for biochar.  Bungoma is a clumsy distance from the lake, a limit on profitability.  The briquette makers are locally made, as are the stoves to burn the briquettes.  Low tech DOES work, although I'm more inclined to anaerobic digestion for methane.

[Vincent Gainey]

Also aware that in Western Kenya, Water Hyacinth is being harvested from Lake Victoria and used by local groups for making mats, baskets etc. Still on a fairly small scale and have not yet heard of it being harvested for fuel use (although thanks to Stephen for the update from Bungoma) but will be interested to see if the trials as a fuel are successful.

[Halina Dawson]

Hi Peter,

Have you tried searching the Abstracts database on BIE? I did a search using the terms: 

("water hyacinth" or "eichhornia crassipes") and (biofuels or biomass or biogas or biodiesel)

.......and got around 170 records. Some are false drops but in the search results there are some studies on various topics including:

•  saccharification to produce bioethanol [Optimization of pretreatment and saccharification for the production of bioethanol from water hyacinth by Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ahn DeukJoo; Kim SeKyung; Yun HyunShik; Park, D. H.; Lee, S. Y.; Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, 2012, 35, 1/2, pp 35-41, 33 ref.] 
•  biogas production [example paper: Methane production characteristics of water hyacinth from different water areas. Qian YuTing; Ye XiaoMei; Chang ZhiZhou; Du Jing; Pan JunCai; China Environmental Science, 2011, 31, 9, pp 1509-1515, 21 ref]

Kind regards

Halina