INTERVIEW: Singapore agency bets on jatropha

14 June 2007 09:56  [Source: ICIS news]

By Jeanne Lim

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--A Singapore research and development agency hopes to give palm oil-based biodiesel plants a run for their money when its higher-yield, energy-efficient jatropha-based technologies finally bear fruit next year.

The Institute of Environmental Science and Engineering (IESE), which plans to start up its 200,000 tonnes/year joint venture biodiesel plant with Van Der Horst in Singapore by 2008, has developed jatropha seeds with higher yield, said David Liang, vice president of technology and commercialisation centre director.

These seeds, which were developed together with an unnamed collaborator, can yield more than 50% oil compared with 30% found in seeds of more common species.

This means that one hectare of jatropha crop yields 2-3 tonnes of oil, more than the 1-1.5 tonnes per hectare produced from average jatropha crops.

Although palm oil yields 4-5 tonnes of oil per hectare, its current $700/tonne price-tag was prohibitive compared with jatropha’s price of about $400/tonne, said Liang, adding that the agency was cultivating its own feedstock in Sichuan province, southwest China, for its joint venture plant.

This will enable the biodiesel joint venture to control its feedstock costs, the Taiwan-born, Canadian-bred academic told ICIS news in an interview.

The IESE, which is 100% owned by Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and funded partly by the country’s Economic Development Board (EDB), has a mission to accelerate the commercialisation of all the technologies it develops in-house, he said.

"The EDB sees us as a vehicle to commercialise our technologies in southeast Asia or even the rest of Asia," he said.

Besides higher-yield jatropha crop technology, the IESE has also commercialised a bio-enzyme technology for converting vegetable oils to biofuels.

Conventional biodiesel production uses chemicals like sodium hydroxide and calcium hydroxide to convert oil to biodiesel while the IESE plans to use a biological process with lipase enzyme.

This process is less energy intensive as it catalyses oils at an ambient temperature of 37-40 degrees Celcius while the chemical process can go up to 120 degrees, said Liang.

"[The biological process] eliminates the use for harmful chemicals and is inherently more environmentally-friendly," he said, adding that this conversion option is application for all types of plant oils.

The agency has also commercialised a process which processes biodiesel by-product glycerine into a higher-value chemical intermediate for use in synthetic fibres.

The glycerine is processed into 1,3-propanediol (1,3-PDO), which could be copolymerised with terephthalic acid (or methyl ester) to form polytrimethylene terephthalate (PTT), a polymer similar to polyethylene terephthalate (PET), Liang said.

Both of these processes have already been commercialised in a 50,000 tonne/year biodiesel plant in Hunan province, China, and the Singapore joint venture will use the lipase enzyme process when it starts up next year.

The joint venture will also build a glycerine-based unit to produce 10,000 tonnes/year of PTT by mid-2009, Liang said.

The IESE collaborated with Tsinghua University, China’s leading engineering institution, for both processes.

Meanwhile, the IESE sees the sharing of its technologies as a means to fuel the development of the jatropha-based biodiesel industry, said Liang.

More than a dozen plantation companies from southeast Asia, China, India and as far as Mozambique, have contacted the IESE to find out more about its jatropha yield technology, he said.

"We’re helping whoever wants to develop jatropha plantations to ensure they get the highest-yield plant stock. Everyone can benefit from it," he added.

By: Jeanne Lim
+65 6780 4359

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