Turning plastic waste into urea fertilizer in Bali, Indonesia

It doesn't matter if you grow rice, soya beans or palm oil. If you are a farmer, you only have the ability to use your land once. So to maximize your yields, fertilizer is used.

The trouble is that fertilizer prices vary enormously because they're linked to the price of natural gas. Indonesia imports 50% of their fertilizer. What Hydrogen Refinery does is to utilize Indonesia's waste to produce fertilizer for Indonesia, in Indonesia, removing the link to global natural gas prices, currency risk and securing security of supply

What we want to do is to break that link with natural gas. So instead of producing the fertilizer from natural gas, which varies in price, we produce it from waste, and in doing so, we can produce it at a low fixed price.

Plastic waste on beaches is a major problem in Bali

Our Plasma Electrolyser System (PES) technology is developed from British military technology. It is covered by seven patents. What it does is transform 10 tonnes of mixed waste per day to 10 tonnes of high-quality urea fertilizer (46% N – Nitrogen), which is the most used fertilizer in Indonesia. To make 20 tonnes per day, we simply put two of the PES units together.

Why is Indonesia important?

Indonesia has a growing population, and more people eat more food, and they create more waste. In fact, Indonesia is the fifth largest fertilizer market in the world, demanding around 12 million tonnes of fertilizer a year. It's also the third largest rice producer, and it's also the fifth largest producer of waste and generator of plastic waste in the oceans.

Waste is also a sad by product, and the Bantar Gebang landfill outside Jakarta is one of the largest in Southeast Asia. It is over 18 stories high and can be seen from space. Each day, around 7,000 tonnes of new waste arrives, and that would be enough to create 2.5 million tonnes of urea fertilizer per year. That would be about half the imported fertilizer into Indonesia.

Most importantly, it would save around 4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO2e) every year.

The Bantar Gebang site is huge and too big to start with for a pilot site. So what we want to do is start at a smaller scale in Bali. Bali is an important location because of the tourism. It also has a terrible problem with mixed plastic waste, and that's something that we want to clean up.

How PES works with non-recyclable plastics such as plastic bags:

Most plastic bags are made of polythene. Polythene is a molecule with the chemical formula C2H4. In plasma system, the polythene molecule is broken down to its hydrogen and carbon species. The hydrogen is used to make ammonia for the fertilizer. The carbon and any other impurities in the waste emerge as a carbon soot that we can use for road building.