Haycarb PLC riding the black gold wave
Haycarb PLC, a global manufacturer and marketer of coconut shell activated carbon completing 50 years this year, is expanding the capacity and position of products in emerging markets, niche high-end applications, and other specialised segments, a top official said.
Taking a teaspoon of activated carbon made from coconut charcoal, Rajitha Kariyawasan, Managing Director Haycarb PLC in his office on Wednesday, says that a single gram of it contains ‘space’ that could be spread out over an area of a football field. And as hard as it may be to understand it is a process called ‘adsorption’.
Consumed widely for various industrial, scientific, and military purposes including refining and bleaching of oils and chemical solutions, water purification, the recovery of solvents and other vapours, retrieval of gold and other precious metals, and as a main ingredient in gas masks and filters that sieve toxic or biochemical gases, activated carbon is one of the most widely used ingredients in the world today. This is probably why it is commonly known as black gold as well, Mr Kariyawasan said. Accounting for over 16 per cent of the global market share, the company has an annual capacity of over 50,000 metric tonnes of activated carbon.
Haycarb manufactures a complete range of standard, washed and impregnated granular activated carbon, powder activated carbon and extruded pellet activated carbon for a full spectrum of application as mentioned earlier. “In the niche high end applications, for example, we develop alternative energy storage applications. Equipped with in-house R&D and engineering capabilities, we offer a total solutions suite to our customers from activated carbon testing and product development, regeneration of spent activated carbon to designing and implementation of activated carbon-based environmental engineering systems,” Mr. Kariyawasan added. He added that in new areas of product development, the company has accelerated investments in R&D and building manufacturing capacity in supercapacitors. Supercapacitors are high-powered energy devices which are adopted in many applications like wind turbines, transportation systems, Start Stop engines in the automobile industry etc. The company is also trying to cotton onto another product, which is hard carbon for sodium ion batteries technology. This is an alternative to lithium-ion batteries. “Now we produce coconut shell based hard carbon and this product has great potential which will be a great value edition to our portfolio,” Mr Kariyawasan added.
Acknowledging that sourcing raw materials, which is coconut shells, for their manufacturing is difficult, he said that the company has located part of its manufacturing factories overseas, such as in Thailand and Indonesia. “When charcoal isn’t feasible to source locally or we cannot rely on the local production, we import 50 per cent of it from overseas.” He said that 40 per cent of the sourced locally primarily come from the coconut triangle. The balance 50 to 60 per cent is used domestically. For the past decade, the company has been aggressively trying to source domestic coconut shells for their manufacturing through entrepreneurship building.
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