Researcher: Bioenergy on Hawai’i Island has great potential

Hawaiʻi Island is primed for the creation of biorefineries designed to use waste from cattle and possibly from humans to create biofuel, according to the University of Hawai’i.

Shihwu Sung, a professor of applied engineering at the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) at Hilo, moved to Hilo last year to explore emerging alternative energy opportunities.

Sung believes biofuels will benefit the people of Hawaiʻi and be sufficiently scalable to have a positive global impact.

He is working on developing a bioenergy conversion lab and renewable energy programme.

‘Humans so far use all kinds of non-renewable resources like fossil fuel, [but] we want sustainability,’ Sung says.

Sung uses the example of coastal biomass-based refineries to illustrate the necessity and opportunity afforded by anaerobic digestion (AD).

Micro- and macroalgae can be harvested using offshore oceanic agriculture and then used for human and animal consumption or they can be processed to extract bio-oil and refined to produce biogas using AD.

‘This island [has] never had a single anaerobic plant. We can build this entire platform together,’ Sung says.

Sung wants to apply the concept of biorefineries using waste biomass from local cattle operations to create bioenergy.

He feels Hawaiʻi Island is perfectly poised to succeed economically in this technology, especially since more money can be made per kWh there than on the continental US and heating is not required.

Sung is currently drawing up a plan that he says would change a local municipal wastewater plant into a power production plant.