The aim of this work was to study the dilute acid pretreatment of rice straw (RS) and fermentable sugar recovery at high solid loadings at pilot scale. A series of pretreatment experiments were performed on RS resulting in > 25 wt% solids followed by enzymatic hydrolysis without solid-liquid separation at 20 and 25 wt% using 10 FPU/g of the pretreated residue. The overall sugar recovery including the sugars released in pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis was calculated along with a mass balance. Accordingly, the optimized conditions, i.e. 0.35 wt% acid, 162 degrees C and 10 min were identified. The final glucose and xylose concentrations obtained were 83.3 and 31.9 g/L respectively resulting in total concentration of 115.2 g/L, with a potential to produce > 50 g/L of ethanol. This is the first report on pilot scale study on acid pretreatment of RS in a screw feeder horizontal reactor followed by enzymatic hydrolysis at high solid loadings. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.