Five Rice Mills Broken Ground at Once; the Rice Husks Become Power-Generation Fuel for Erex

On the afternoon of October 3, 2026, a groundbreaking ceremony for a rice-mill chain was held in Dong Hiep commune (xã Đông Hiệp), Can Tho city. The developer is Green CT (Công ty Cổ phần Green CT). The plan lines up five mills, and the Dong Hiep mill that broke ground has a capacity of 750 tonnes of polished rice a day and night. What is worth noting is the by-product that comes out of it. The rice husks that come out at about 250 tonnes a day at full operation are routed, in partnership with Japan's Erex (EREX), to fuel for biomass power generation. It is a story of a Japanese power company coming to secure Vietnam's rice husks as fuel.

250 tonnes of husk against 750 tonnes of polished rice: the figures mesh

What the Can Tho local paper Báo Cần Thơ reported is short. Green CT's rice-mill chain has five mills. Of these, the Dong Hiep mill does 750 tonnes of polished rice a day and night, with about 250 tonnes of husk at full operation. It holds everything from buying paddy to milling for export in-house, and turns the husk after milling into fuel for biomass power generation in cooperation with Erex. That is as far as was disclosed; neither the total investment nor the locations and capacities of the remaining four mills are out.

Consistency can be checked with just the two figures that are out. Putting the milling yield at 65%, the paddy needed to produce 750 tonnes of polished rice is about 1,154 tonnes. Husk is roughly 20% of paddy weight, so that comes to about 231 tonnes, nearly overlapping with the announced about 250 tonnes. Lower the yield a little and it reaches 250 tonnes. It is not a figure that inflates the by-product volume. Note that this yield and husk ratio are general values set by the writer, not figures published by the mill.

Lê Công Lý, standing vice-chairman of the city People's Committee, attended the groundbreaking. He rated the project as holding real significance for the city's development, and said he expects it to give rise to new ways of organizing production, to draw out more of rice's value, to raise farmers' incomes, and to supply energy feedstock stably. What the city asked of Green CT was five points: securing resources, safe construction on schedule, building a raw-material-region linkage that is more than nominal, adhering to the promise of transparency in cooperation, and fulfilling responsibility toward cooperatives, farmers, and the environment.

Erex already runs a plant powered by rice husk alone in the same city

Let us pin down the facts on the Erex side with what the company posts on its own site. The Hau Giang biomass power plant has an output of 20,000 kW, began operating in April 2025, and runs on rice husk. It is Vietnam's first commercial biomass power plant and also the company's first overseas. The amount of husk this plant uses in a year is reported at about 130,000 tonnes.

Do not overlook that the way the location is written has changed. Erex records the plant's location as former Hau Giang province (now Can Tho city). On July 1, 2025, Hau Giang province was merged with Can Tho city and Soc Trang province into a new Can Tho city with an area of 6,400.83 square kilometers and a population of over 4 million. Both the rice mill that broke ground this time and the plant that burns the husk are within the same city. It is not that the physical distance between mill and plant has shrunk, but the counterpart for permits and administrative consultation now fits within a single city. That the city's standing vice-chairman came to the groundbreaking and ordered a raw-material-region linkage can be read as being because the fuel's outlet is within the same city.

Lining up this table shows how much of the fuel supply-demand gets filled. Running 250 tonnes a day for 300 days a year is 75,000 tonnes, and for 365 days 91,250 tonnes, which is 60% to 70% of the 130,000 tonnes the Hau Giang plant uses a year. This is the calculation for just the one mill that broke ground. Because the capacities and locations of the remaining four mills are not published, how much the whole chain produces cannot be calculated at this point. Still, the order does not change: keeping the same amount of fuel coming out every day is harder than building a power plant. This is where Erex's reason for teaming up with the milling side lies.

When rice husk gets a price in Vietnam, it begins to compete with Japan's uses for rice husk

For Japan's agriculture and food people, there are three points worth reading in this project.

The first is the speed at which rice husk changes from something to be disposed of into something to be sold. In Japan, rice husk has been taken up as carbonized husk, seedling-raising soil, livestock-shed bedding, and material for insulation and silica, but the unit price is low relative to the volume produced, and in growing areas there are cases of paying disposal fees. In Vietnam, an outlet in the form of power-generation fuel has appeared at one site on the scale of 130,000 tonnes a year, and behind it is electricity sold under a feed-in tariff. A by-product for which demand as fuel has arisen easily ends up being taken from other uses. Japanese companies buying Vietnamese rice husk or husk-derived materials would do well to factor in the possibility that the price moves.

The second is that how a rice mill's profitability looks changes. A mill with a fixed buyer for its by-product finds it hard to stop operating even if the margin on the rice itself thins. Put the other way, if paddy collection runs dry, the fuel supply to the power plant thins too, so there is a motive to make contracts with farmers and cooperatives real. That the city asked Green CT for a raw-material-region linkage that is more than nominal is likely because it sees this structure. From the standpoint of those locally procuring Japanese rice ingredients (rice flour, rice crackers, packaged cooked rice, feed use), one can take the view that a mill holding a by-product outlet tends to have stable collection.

The third is that outlets for Vietnam's agricultural by-products are being created one after another. Already, an operator processing one roll of rice straw into 50 boxes of fire starter is in operation, and Kansai Electric Power has entered a JCM survey on the scale of 100,000 ha of coconut shell. Rice, rice straw, coconut shell: phases in which things that used to be piled beside fields and plants get a price are advancing in parallel. The Japanese involvement that can be confirmed is two cases, Erex's rice husk and Kansai Electric's coconut shell.

Projects run under JCM come with an obligation to measure and report the fuel's provenance

By-products sold as fuel come with conditions different from fresh fruit or ingredients. Erex writes that it develops its Vietnam business on the basis of the national power development plans (PDP7, PDP8) and the accreditation of Japan's Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM). JCM's equipment-subsidy projects are a scheme that issues credits after measuring, reporting, and verifying the greenhouse-gas emission-reduction effect. Since emission reductions are shown in figures, where the fuel comes from and how it is transported become subject to recording. In the Kansai Electric coconut-shell case too, what the buyer was actually looking at was the ledger rather than the volume.

This comes back to the trade in rice itself. A mill that can account for where it collects paddy with its books can produce the same records in rice trade bound for the EU or Japan too. That Can Tho city cited adhering to the promise of transparency as a condition for Green CT means this is a point that works for both milling and power generation.

The logistics side is moving too. At Can Tho port, a route on which a scheduled service from China arrives and loads 80 containers of rice bran on the return leg has started up. Rice husk, rice bran, rice straw: rice by-products have begun moving toward separate buyers. A rice mill is at once a company that sells rice and, increasingly, a company that sorts by-products in several directions.

If you inquire, decide the order of your questions

We lay out confirmation points for the Japanese side procuring from Vietnamese rice mills or sourcing rice ingredients to draw this movement toward their own purchasing.

Note that Green CT's project has only just broken ground, and neither its operating date nor total investment is published. Where the remaining four mills will be built is also unknown. It is an early stage for bringing in contract talks.

Summary

From a 750-tonne polished-rice mill come 250 tonnes of husk a day, and that becomes power-generation fuel for a Japanese power company. The annual output of just the one mill that broke ground reaches 60% to 70% of the 130,000 tonnes a year Erex uses at Hau Giang. Grasping this sense of scale shows that Vietnam's rice husk will no longer be a surplus from here on.

There are two things that can be done right away. One is, if you buy rice husk or husk-derived materials from Vietnam, to ask the supplier whether there is a contract for power generation. The other is, if you procure rice ingredients, to confirm where the rice mill you deal with sells its by-products. Where the by-products are sold mirrors how serious that mill is about collecting paddy.

Sources

• Báo Cần Thơ, Khởi công chuỗi nhà máy chế biến gạo và Trung tâm cung ứng nhiên liệu sinh khối
• Erex, About its business in Vietnam (plant overview, PDP8 candidate sites, JCM)
• JETRO, Erex brings Vietnam's first commercial biomass power plant online (Vietnam)
• VietnamPlus, Vietnam's first rice husk-fueled biomass power plant inaugurated in Hau Giang
• Tuổi Trẻ, Lý do giữ tên Cần Thơ sau sáp nhập với Hậu Giang và Sóc Trăng