Production of Biogas using Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) in an Anaerobic Digester

The palm oil industry is one of the leading industries in Malaysia with a yearly
production of more than 13 million tons of crude palm oil and plantations covering 11%
of the Malaysian land area. However, the production of such amounts of crude palm oil
result in even larger amounts of palm oil mill eflluent (POME), estimated at nearly three
times the quantity of crude palm oiL Palm oil mill eflluent (POME) is a highly polluting
wastewater that pollutes the environment if discharged directly due to its high chemical
oxygen demand (COD) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) concentration.
Anaerobic digestion has been widely used for POME treatment with large emphasis
placed on capturing the methane gas released as a product of this biodegradation
treatment method. The anaerobic digestion method is recognized as a clean development
mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto protocol. Certified emission reduction (CER) can
be obtained by using methane gas as a renewable energy. This project aim is to do a
research on the factors that contribute to the optimization of biogas production. Potential
factors to the anaerobic digestion process of POME were indentified and tested in
laboratory by using Anaerobic Respirometer. These factors such as addition of cosubstrate,
volume of inoculums, volume of POME and PH of samples were analyzed
and monitored to see its relation to the production of biogas. The total gas production
volume and gas production rate in the experiment were gathered and their composition
were tested in Gas Chromatography to analyze the percentage of Methane present.
From this project those four ( 4) factors were identified to have significant effects to the
biogas production volume, rate as well as the percentage of Methane present in the
biogas composition. These factors are applicable to prove in this research by conducting
experiment in the laboratory with existing equipments.