Just last month, Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution expressed interest in algae-based liquid palm oil waste (POME) processing technology developed by Japan’s Mobiol Corporation and Tsukuba University. The machine is expected to minimize pollution while turning them into marketable products like aquatic and animal feed, as well as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid used for food and medicine.

“The concept is very interesting, as it turns waste into cash,” Darmin said. “But we will have to try it outside the lab at several oil palm plantations before implementing it nationwide.”

Still, he said adopting such technology was important to address environmental concerns of the palm oil industry, including methane emissions. According to the ministry’s release, experts estimate that methane from POME is around 27 times heavier than the planet-warming carbon dioxide.

As the world’s biggest palm oil producer, Indonesia produces 455,000 tons of palm oil effluents daily, or about 156 million tons per year, which comes out of around 873 palm oil mills in Indonesia, according to the ministry’s data.

But the technology’s inventor, Tsukuba University professor Makoto Watanabe, expressed optimism that palm oil producers could alleviate environmental issues while getting four times their current earnings from DHA sales.

He cited as an example that the processing of waste from a 50,000-hectare oil palm plantation could help companies reap US$98 million (Rp 1.39 trillion) per year for aquatic and animal feed and $43 million per year for DHA sales.

Besides, he claimed, annual global demand had now reached 250,000 tons for DHA, 4 million tons for aquatic feed and 1 million tons for animal feed. Darmin added that the country could export them, since domestic consumption of DHA was relatively low.

Vegetable Oil Refiners Association executive director Sahat Sinaga applauded recent efforts to convert POME, which he said was usually left behind and polluted lagoons.

With the extra revenue stream, he explained, producers could maintain a low price for their crude palm oil (CPO) and avoid disrupting other vegetable oil markets, including those for oil from rapeseed and soy bean. Eventually, oil palm farmers could get a better price for their product too, he added.

“If we implement such technologies, we could be among the world’s biggest DHA producers, while earning more [from POME processing] than the actual palm oil products,” Sahat said.

Meanwhile, biogas producer PT REA Kaltim set aside Rp 50 billion last year for developing POME-fueled electricity generators, giving electricity access to more than 73,000 people in three districts of Kutai Kartanegara regency, East Kalimantan, according to the company’s manager.

Other palm oil producers have also looked into eco-friendly waste management in recent years.

In 2016, the government issued a regulation that sets the feed-in tariff for electricity from power plants fired with POME-based biogas, pushing state-owned electricity firm PLN to buy excess power from such plants. One year later, the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry boasted of a program requiring palm oil companies to turn their effluents into biogas used for power generation.

But Bogor Agricultural University plantation expert Dwi Andreas Santosa argued the “extraordinary” initial investment these projects would involve could discourage many palm oil producers to implement such methods, despite long-term benefits.

While he admitted that various stakeholders were converting their palm oil waste into usable products, Dwi said that most producers were merely processing to meet the government’s safety standards before discharging it into the environment. Furthermore, their aerobic management still released harmful methane into the air, he added.

As an alternative, he suggested producers use anaerobic wastewater treatment systems that allowed them to capture methane for biogas production. At the same time, they could harness the remaining solid waste as fertilizer and liquid detritus for its high nitrogen solutions for numerous purposes.

“It’s normal to process palm oil effluents, since they are mostly organic,” Dwi said. “Going forward, we have to focus on how we can completely eliminate waste by turning into into base ingredients for something useful [...] with the investment problems in mind.”

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