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Executive Column: Sea6 Energy to substitute fossil fuel with greener seaweed biofuel
Ocean farming startup Sea6 Energy says seaweed can replace costly imported crude oil with enough research, production scale and investment.
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Nelson Vadassery, co-founder and chief technology officer of ocean farming start-up Sea6 Energy spoke to The Jakarta Post on Friday. Jan. 27, 2023. The company has aimed to turn seaweed as biofuel, which can help reduce reliance on costly imported crude oil, while helping countries to achieve their net-zero target. (Sea6 Energy/PR Team)
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em>Indonesia, like many countries in the world, is struggling to strike a balance between fossil fuels like crude oil, which is relatively more affordable and abundant, and the urge to pursue net-zero emission targets by transition toward renewable energy, which still has a high cost and not enough scale for a significant shift.
Ocean farming start-up Sea6 Energy cofounder and chief technology officer Nelson Vadassery spoke to The Jakarta Post’s Billy Adison Aditijanto on Jan. 27 about a vision to use seaweed as an alternative form of biofuel to massively reduce reliance on fossil fuel, and how soon it can be ready to enter Indonesian market.
Questions: Why has biofuel made from seaweed stagnated at the research stage?
Answer: Everyone has been struggling with the cost and scale of biomass. When you are talking about replacing crude oil with bio-crude from seaweed, it is a huge volume game, which currently also comes at huge costs.
To make seaweed viable as biofuel, the cost of biomass needs to arrive at about US$100 (Rp 1.5 million) per tonne. However, the cost of biomass is currently way above thousands of US dollars per tonne.
If we could grow a lot more of it with the right production price, that's when biofuel made from seaweed would become a reality.
Another obstacle is the productivity per farmer in a seaweed cultivation is really low. We are in the stone age of seaweed agriculture.
