Indonesia has great potential to increase the downstreaming of essential oils, supported by the availability of domestic raw materials. Therefore, strategic policies are needed to spur innovation of derivative products from essential oils so that they can be utilized by the wider community.
“Indonesia has as many as 40 types of essential plants from 99 types of essential plants in the world. This is an opportunity to increase the added value of domestic raw materials through the role of the downstream essential oil industry (IHMA),” said Plt. Director General of Agro Industry, Ministry of Industry, Putu Juli Ardika in Jakarta, Thursday (9/12).
Plt. The Director General of Agro Industry stated that currently the IHMA sector has been able to process essential oils, especially citronella oil, which can be used as biodiesel fuel oil (BBM) diesel or gasoline. In addition to creating multiple added values, these efforts also support import substitution policies for fuel.
“The value chain of the fuel bioadditive industry begins with essential oil refining plantations, which are generally small and medium in scale. Sophisticated product trial formulation techniques can produce BBM bioadditive products to be used widely in terms of national economic life,” said Putu.
The key for the development of the IHMA sector to be more competitive is through research and innovation, product formulation, and utilizing the latest technology in the production process to produce various downstream products with high added value. This is in line with the implementation of the Making Indonesia 4.0 roadmap.
“These efforts need to be supported by adequate research facilities, competent human resources, and strong capturing and delivering value to market, so that Indonesia becomes a world-scale producer of various essential oil derivative products,” he added.
Putu said the benefits of the working mechanism of the bioadditive fuel product include increasing the efficiency of engine combustion performance, capturing associated water, increasing the octane or cetane number in conventional fuel, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“From these results, there will be savings in fuel consumption. This has been proven from several test results,” he said. After using this fuel bioadditive, the performance improvement is around 6-13 percent. In addition, the use of essential oils as fuel bioadditives shows that the business activities of the people’s scale essential oil industry can be promoted.
“On a conventional scale, smallholder distillers only produce crude essential oil as raw material for large industries producing flavors, flavors and fragrances. However, currently there is product diversification and a significant increase in added value from essential oil commodities to end products, especially citronella oil,” he explained.
Essential oils have been used as industrial raw materials for essences, flavors and fragrances. The total production of Indonesia’s main essential oils reaches 8,500 tons in 2020. Several types of Indonesian tropical essential oils include clove oil, citronella, patchouli, nutmeg, vetiver, and eucalyptus.
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