The biomass way for new energy, cleaner environment

KUALA LUMPUR - The much-touted biomass, an inevitable organic waste which can be converted into energy and other commercial products, has yet to make any significant contribution to a cleaner environment in the country.
And in the meantime, the tonnes upon tonnes of biowaste from the country's 3.6 million hectares of oil palm - fronds, trunks and empty fruit bunches - are going to waste, adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and hastening the feared "greenhouse" effect.
Director-General of Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) Datuk Dr Yusof Basiron said any burning of the oil palm waste would release carbon dioxide into the air.
But if the waste are converted into biomass and tapped as an energy source, the level of carbon in the atmosphere would be maintained if not reduced.
This is the opposite of fossil fuel sources which can only add more of the gas to hasten the greenhouse effect, he explained.
In the Malaysian context, the main supply of biomass is the oil palm plantation covering an area of 3.6 million hectares, producing over 35 million tonnes of biomass in the form of trunks, fronds and empty fruit bunches (EFB) a year.
During the replanting, the trees yield some 25 million tonnes of the trunks annually.
The current practice of disposing the oil palm waste is to dump them back to the field or to burn them - both ways give a negative impact on the environment.
With this in mind, Dr Yusof said the government had come up with the idea of producing five percent of the country's energy in 2005 from biomass, specifically oil palm waste.
"We don't want to over-exploit fossil fuel, but start using the available raw material and renewable resource," he said, while admitting that it is a big challenge to the government to get the people to use less fossil fuels.
This is because Malaysia has a lot of raw materials and energy sources such as petroleum, gas, timber and rubberwood, which put a brake on the use of oil palm biomass.
"People are still comfortable with the current raw material availability from other sources," he explained.
Dr Yusof said the importance of oil palm biomass would emerge when the shift in raw material supply takes place.
"Rubberwood which is the main source now is depleting, so the shift would be towards oil palm biomass. This natural shift would take some time to occur. This is the reason why we want the industry to respond very fast and start commercial exploitation as soon as possible, and not wait for the natural shift," he said.
He said the fact that the government had outlawed the open burning of oil palm waste is a clear message to the industry players to find a profitable use of the waste.
It is up to the industry to maximise revenue by making the biomass in the most efficient and profitable way, he said.
Noting that necessity in the mother of all inventions, he said the low prices of palm oil and lack of income would drive the industry to go for the greater use of oil palm biomass.
He said incentives like rebates, tax exemption and regulations would also induce all sectors, especially big industry players, to employ environment-friendly energy use.
Dr Yusof felt that there is no need for other organic waste when the oil palm sector is the main source of biomass. "It has excess amounts (of biomass) and that should be exploited right now," he argued.
The industry, he said, had to work out on the logistics factor in such a way there would be minimum transporting cost of raw material and finished products.
"The raw materials should be also transported with great efficiency, meaning that they should not transport very crude kind of raw materials because they contain a lot of water," he said.
So, there must be a scheme to allow each mill to have a pre-processing facility to dry the fiber and compact it before it is marketed, said Dr Yusof.
As for funding of these projects, he said a lot of banks such as Bank Industri and even the commercial banks would look at the viability of a project before giving the financial backing.
As far as biomass is concerned, he said it is something very new and the banks need to be fully exposed, especially on the potentials of the industry.
To make things click, he said MPOB had invested RM20 million to RM30 million (on R&D work) in the last 20 years.
MPOB had also been very aggressive to make the biomass industry a success, and had staged various seminars to unfold the potentials of the industry for the players and the banks.
Recently, MPOB jointly organised a two-day seminar on "Oil Palm Biomass: Opportunities for Commercialisation" with Faunhofer Liaison Office, Malaysia and The Chamber of Commerce, Hannover Hildersheim, Lower Saxonia, Germany.
MPOB, he said, has also established a medium density fiberboard (MDF) pilot plant to undertake development work with the objective of gradually replacing rubberwood as a major material for MDF and improving the quality of the MDF produced.
"We are there to help the companies that have problems in shifting from rubberwood to oil palm fibers," he added. - Bernama