BY GABRIEL LIHAN & ABIDGAIL MERTA GANGGANG
KUCHING: Next to the Sejingkat Power Station, some 20 kms from Kuching City, is a five-hectare microalgae production facility.
The CHITOSE Carbon Capture Central which produces microalgae is the largest production facility using a so-called flat-panel photobioreactor in the world.
Besides ensuring Sarawak is at the forefront in mitigating climate change, the microalgae production facility is also the future for renewable energy in Sarawak.
CHITOSE Group started the construction of Chitose Carbon Capture Central (C4) in March 2020.
Today, it has more than 30 researchers from the company, Sarawak Biodiversity Centre and Sarawak Energy conducting research at C4.
Dr.Takanori Hoshino, chief bioengineer and executive officer of Chitose Laboratory Corp, said that C4 uses carbon dioxide gas which is supplied from the Sejingkat Power station.
He said that the implementation of this new technology and using the carbon dioxide gas from the powerplant, is the largest demonstration in the world funded by New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO), a national research and development agency in Japan.
He added that besides producing mass microalgal biomass, CHITOSE Group also produces agricultural products like strawberries in Cameron Highlands.
In an interview with New Sarawak Tribune, Dr. Hoshino said that in the next 15 to 20 years, microalgae would be the next big thing in the future, as it would produce more than just oil and have a positive impact on the environment because of the usage of carbon dioxide which reduces carbon emission.
NST: What does CHITOSE do with microalgae?
Dr. Hoshino: We would like to create a sustainable environment to help society. We have discovered that microalgae has several benefits. For example, microalgae can be used for food/feed products, fuels, polymers (plastics) as well as pharmaceutical and cosmetic purposes.
The issues related to food and health, energy, and environment need to be improved and solved concomitantly. Microalgae are one of the essential candidates that provide potential solutions for issues associated with the nexus between food and health, energy, and environment.
Microalgae are micro- organisms, use minimum amount of freshwater and are not bad for the environment because they use carbon dioxide to reduce carbon emission.
For example, after the extraction of oil, they become a dry form of microalgae biomass and we can use this for all the food applications we are developing.
How long does the production process take?
Chemical components are extracted and separated from microalgae biomass and then used for concomitant production of diverse commercial products. Some products double every five to six hours.
If it is harvested in three days, so every three days we keep harvesting throughout the year. For instance, from one hectare of soybeans from the US, it can produce 3.5 tons. In terms of corns, we can produce 11 tons. In terms of oil palm, we can produce 17 tons of oil. So from algae, we produce 70 tons. It means we can produce biomass 20 times more than corns.
But from microalgae, we can produce three times more than oil and compared to the amount of proteins, we can have three times more protein than soybeans and more carbohydrate than corn. So we can produce all that at the same time. That’s what we really want, a future which we like to do.
We can produce even multiple times more oil than the Ghawar field, the biggest oil reservoir in Saudi Arabia,. So this is the future I would like to do and it is going to be simultaneously produced and at the same time, we can actually have about 5.2 billion tons of seaweed. So we believe that we can establish a very sustainable industry and society.
What are the challenges and problems currently faced?
The problem so far is we don’t really have a stable mass production of algae biomass. There is a lack of stable production on a large/industrial scale. We must have mass production first and also we have to develop applications so people can use those materials. We are trying to demonstrate the mass production of microalgae biomass. Therefore in order to overcome those challenges, we would need to establish a stable production on a large/industrial scale and demand for diverse applications.
This project is funded by the Japanese government and we are going to have the opening on April 4.
Basically from 2020 to 2024, in these five years, we are going to construct this facility and demonstrate the production of microalgae.
Is it possible to have production of microalgae at home?
There are actually small applications that are available commercially, but the amount of biomass that you can produce is very, very tiny. You can at least give it to your fish. We also have to produce different kinds of applications. Right now, this is a project that we established in Japan, which we named microalgae towards sustainable and resilient industry, or what everyone called Matsuri. Matsuri in Japanese is a festival.
We are going to produce a matsuri biomass and we will separate it into different intermediates like oil, proteins and carbohydrates. We have about 40 to 50 collaborators from Japanese industries that are trying to develop different kinds of applications. Not only for fuels but like plastic, also different kinds of plastics. Not just plastics, but we are going to establish the processing protocols for the final product. We extract oil and convert it into plastics and the plastics will be converted into car parts.
What are your future plans for the company?
We have been collaborating with Sarawak biodiversity centre for 10 years. We have established five hectares of plants but for the future, we are planning to develop and expand to 100 hectares, which is 20 times bigger than this facility, and expanding up to 2000 hectares. Still very small when compared to oil palm plantations. If we have 2000 hectares of microalgae, we can produce up to 140,000 tonnes of biomass, we can produce 35,000 tons of oil, and 77,000 tons of protein.
The production of these materials is going to cost RM1.4 billion every year, but if we process it into a final product, we can actually make sales of around RM2.8 billion . We can basically, annually, make a gross profit margin of RM1.4 billion. This is something we really want to develop in Sarawak, we can actually domestically produce here, not only fuels, food and feed.
With the aim of one day expanding the farm to 100 hectares by 2027 and 2,000 hectares in 2030, this would enable a part of downstream processing to be integrated at C4 which will also ensure commercialisation.
Besides that, since, this is funded by the Japanese government, we are going to demonstrate the production for research purposes and provide this biomass to all these partners to develop research applications and we are going to purchase and use this for commercial production.
