Microalgae Treatment Of Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) For Biohydrogen And Biomethane Production

This report highlights the complete experiment studies on the Final Year Project 1 and 2
entitled “Microalgae Treatment of Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) for Biohydrogen and
Biomethane Production”. This project investigates the study on microalgae growth on
Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) as an alternate source of media culturing while acting as
simultaneous functions for wastewater treatment and bioenergies production. The
requirement of tertiary treatment to alleviate water pollution problems in Malaysia
caused by waste discharged from industrial waste such as POME has lead to the analysis
on the potential of microalgae as an alternative way in solving for high operation costs
and efficiency problems in removing pollutants. Anaerobic digestions of POME is
conducted and studied to determine the suitable conditions for algae growth as well as to
examine their ability in assisting biohydrogen and biomethane production under
anaerobic conditions. This final report highlighted the methodology for measuring
composition of biogas production by using different stages of design method for
anaerobic digestions of POME with the additional of inoculums, co-substrate, Empty
Fruit Bunch (EFB) and algae (Tetraselmis sp.and Pavlouva sp.). Results shown that little
percentage of hydrogen are obtained in samples with no inoculums added and improved
on samples with additional of inoculums. No methane yield had shown on both samples
with EFB addition with only presents without additional of EFB. Methane yield was
found at the highest of anaerobic digestion of POME with introduction of Tetraselmis
sp. and inoculums without additional of EFB source. In contrast, only methane
production was shown improved for anaerobic digestion of POME with Pavlouva sp.
whilst no hydrogen production shown from this stage.