Jakarta – The biodiesel industry is bucking the declining trend caused by the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic. Predicted unable to realize target this year (2020), biofuel producers have managed to increase production, raising optimism that production of biofuel from the crude palm oil (CPO) will be higher this year and next year.
The Association of Indonesian Biofuel Producers (Aprobi) reported recently that the biofuel production during the third quarter 2020 reached 6.4 million kiloliters. During September 2020 alone production reached 740,295 kiloliters, which was the highest during the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic.
“We only saw a small amount of decline in production due to the pandemic. We’re surprised. We thought that this pandemic would drastically cut the production. We expected maximum decline up to 10 percent below production target,” Aprobi Chairman M. P. Tumanggor told Bisnis.com recently.
He said that Aprobi targeted the biodiesel production volume in 2020 will reach 9.5 million kiloliters or an increase of around 14 percent per year. Last year, the realized production reached 8.3 million kiloliters. That means, Tumanggor had only predicted that the biodiesel production until the end of 2020 would only increase by 1.9 percent per year to around 8.5 million kiloliters.
According to him, the biodiesel production in 2021 is predicted to reach 10 million kiloliters. It means Aprobi predicts the biodiesel production next year will grow by at least 16 percent. “It is due to the implementation of the 30 percent mixture of fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) with diesel fuel or biodiesel 30 percent (B30). The government is also conducting the test of B40 use,” Tumanggor noted.
He said that the biodiesel production target for 2021 is still being calculated as the government has yet to issue a number of new policies and regulations. He said that currently the stakeholders are conducting the test of the formula of mixing 30 percent of FAME and 10 percent of green diesel to produce the biodiesel 40 percent or B40.
He said that the government will reach a consensus on the B40 formula in mid-December 2020. “So, the local absorption of palm oil will increase next year due to the biodiesel production,” he said. (*)
Source: Bisnis.com | Image via beritasatu.com
