JAKARTA – Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto said that the country was starting to conduct trial tests in producing fuel from palm oil waste with a trial production facility built in Batam.
“The industry ministry is looking forward and sees that fuels in Indonesia could be produced from palm oil,” Hartarto said during a press conference after receiving an electric donated by a Japanese auto company, according to a report carried on the website of the Indonesian Association of Palm Oil Producers (GAPKI).
Haryanto said that if the tests were successful, Indonesia had the potential of producing some three million kiloliters of that biofuel a year. The country also stood to have a huge fuel reserve if the test results were good.
The minister said that researches on fuels produced from palm oil waste had already been conducted by a team from Japan’s Tsukuba University, working together with a German research institute.
“The professor who conducted the research at Tsukuba University has already met with the industry minister. We have also built a test plant in Batam,” Hartarto said.
The extraction of the fuel from the palm oil waste uses algae.