[Unpad Media Channel] The professor from the Faculty of Agroindustrial Technology Universitas Padjadjaran, Dr Efri Mardawati, M.T., said that energy resilience became one of the crucial matters from national to international scope. The problem of fossil energy availability, which becomes limited, requires a solution.
Therefore, biological resources or biomass availability can be alternative sources. This matter has become significant to some researchers and policymakers.
“So, food resilience and energy resilience becomes the recent national and international concern, there has been a particularly significant impact on the availability of fossil energy,” said Efri on HardTalk, streamed by Unpad YouTube Channel a while ago.
On that occasion, Efri explains that biomass can come from direct and indirect derivatives of plants and animals. The utilization of biomass for energy includes the utilization of agricultural waste.
Efri, as the Chair of the Research Collaboration Center for Biomass and Biorefinery under the auspices of the National Research and Innovation Agency, processes biomass into a variety of derivative products through biorefinery technology.
“The concern is how to process this biomass not to only produces one product but all fractions are processed to produce a number of downstream products,” said Efri.
One of them is processing oil palm empty fruit bunches into several products, such as bioethanol as an alternative energy and xylitol as an alternative food ingredient.
As said by Efri, using waste as a source of bioenergy also simultaneously addresses environmental issues. By processing them into high-value products, waste does not become an ecological burden but generates benefits.
“The utilization of biomass derived from agroindustrial residue, a form of agricultural waste, is highly needed because it not only produces added value products but also addresses environmental issues. So if this waste is not handled, it will become an enormous environmental burden,” said Efri. (arm/SA)*
