Sustainability Implications of the Incorporation of a Biogas Trapping System into a Conventional Crude Palm Oil Supply Chain

Abstract

This paper presents the sustainability implications of installing biogas trapping systems in palm oil mills of a crude palm oil production supply chains in Malaysia. The study evaluates the impact of this mitigation strategy on the existing supply chains published by Lim and Biswas. The experience of a local palm oil mill installed with the KUBOTA biogas trapping system was incorporated into a typical 60 metric tonne per hour palm oil mill for effluent treatment. This allowed us to assess the changes in sustainability performance of the whole crude palm oil supply chain using the Palm Oil Sustainability Assessment (POSA) framework. Installing the biogas trapping system increased waste recycling and reuse percentage of the mill from 81.81% to 99.99% and the energy ratio (energy output/fossil fuel and biomass energy input) from 2.45 to 2.56; and reduced the Greenhouse Gas emission of the supply chain from 0.814 tonne CO2eq to 0.196 tonne CO2eq per tonne of Crude Palm Oil. This system could also potentially increase the mill’s annual revenue by 2.3%, while sacrificing the sustainability performance of other economic indicators (i.e., a further 3% negative deviation of actual growth rate from sustainable growth rate). Overall, sustainability score of the supply chain improved from 3.47/5 to 3.59/5 on the 5-level-Likert-scale due to environmental improvement strategy consideration. Finally, this paper shows that the POSA framework is capable of capturing changes in the sustainability performance of triple bottom line indicators associated with the use or incorporation of any improvement strategy in the crude palm oil supply chain.

Social Aspects in the Assessment of Biobased Value Chains

“…Asia is the region with the highest number of studies (Central and Southern Asia [32][33][34][35][36][37], Eastern and South Eastern Asia [38][39][40][41][42][43]), covering six of these feedstocks. Sugarcane [44][45][46][47][48], oil palm [39,40,49,50] and biomass for biogas (manure and residues) [35][36][37][38]51,52] are the feedstocks that are assessed in the highest number of world regions. For example, social assessments of palm oil were performed in Eastern and South Eastern Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.…”

“…Finally, a recurring example affecting the health of plantation workers was reported for palm oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia. Here, the plantation workers' access to drinking water was restricted due to pollution or limited availability [39,40].…”

“…In addition to methane, this effluent releases a strong odor into the surrounding neighborhood. According to [40], this was reflected in the number of complaints that governmental institutions in Malaysia receive each year due to odor pollution stemming from crude palm oil production facilities.…”

Alternative POME Treatment Technology in the Implementation of Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO), and Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) Standards Using LCA and AHP Methods

“…Gaseous emissions come from the biomass-boiler chimney and are used for electricity generation. POME treatment is dominated by open lagoon technology [2]. This technology has environmentally detrimental effects because it releases significant greenhouse gases (GHGs) and needs more than 60-90 days of hydraulic retention time (HRT) (Figure 1).…”

Limiting factors for biogas production from cow manure: energo-environmental approach

“…Today, despite the ever-increasing environmental concerns over the dependency on non-renewable energy resources, the major global energy systems still depend on fossil fuels (Florio et al, 2019;Lim & Biswas, 2019;Nosratabadi et al, 2019;Sharma, Ansari, Pal, Singh, & Lalhriatpuia, 2019;Škapa & Vochozka, 2019;Tabesh, Feizee Masooleh, Roghani, & Motevallian, 2019;Torabi, Hashemi, Saybani, Shamshirband, & Mosavi, 2019). However, because of environmental concerns, the world is shifting towards renewable energy resources (Afsharzade et al, 2016;Baena-Moreno et al, 2019;Eder & Mahlberg, 2018;Lyytimäki, 2018;Nethengwe, Uhunamure, & Tinarwo, 2018;Rosa et al, 2018;Vochozka, Maroušková, & Šuleř, 2018).…”