A fuzzy analytic hierarchy process for the site selection of the Philippine algal industry

Abstract

The Philippine algae industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that requires restructuring to further gain global market share. Through the development of new algal bioproducts by strategically repositioning and enabling collaboration with existing industries, the Philippine algal industry aims to enhance its economic status. The decentralized locations of regions in the Philippines make it challenging to select a potential site for the industry. A decision support system is proposed to aid the industry for site selection that evaluates the different regions based on environmental impact, costs, social aspects, and industry presence. In addition, the site assessment considers the viewpoints of the various stakeholders to arrive at a sound and just decision. Thus, a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method is employed to include the uncertainty in the subjectivity in the viewpoints of different stakeholders such as the academe, the government, and the industry. In addition, the FAHP approach is capable of combining both qualitative and quantitative data. The combined results revealed the level of importance of the main criteria with a combined weight of 43% for the environmental impact, 22% for the costs, 21% for the social aspects, and 14% for the industry presence. The disparity of priorities was observed among the stakeholders where the industry chose costs at 29% above other criteria when compared to the government and the academe which chose environmental impact at 44% and 40%, respectively, among other criteria. The highly preferred sites for the Philippine algae industry were Calabarzon, Northern Mindanao, Western Visayas, and Central Luzon due to the good potential labor force, presence of industries, and available resources in the regions. In order to achieve a harmonious prioritization of criteria among the stakeholders, policies on the encouragement of public investment on regions with marginal income must be considered.

Graphic Abstract

Appendices

Appendix 1: The four main criteria

Appendix 1.1: Environmental impact

The environmental impact criterion was chosen as a combination of various criteria which may affect the environment with respect to the consumption of natural resources including material and energy streams (United Nations Environment Programme 2010). The sub-criteria considered under the environmental impact were the availability of the natural resources (water and land availability), availability of utilities (fertilizer and electricity supply), and carbon footprint.

The growth, harvesting, and processing of any biomass results to environmental impact such as natural resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Various environmental impacts are exemplified by the environmental footprints described by the review paper of Čuček et al. (2012). The significance of considering the environmental impact of any sustainable industrial process is highlighted by Čuček et al. (2015) where some environmental footprints have exceeded the safe threshold limit of the planet. In the sustainable production of any biomass, the nutrient supply is a major factor as suggested by Razon (2015). The natural resources include most of the resources necessary for biomass cultivation. Generally, photoautotrophic growth of microalgae requires some of the basic natural resources such as sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and inorganic nutrients for the cultivation medium (Brennan and Owende 2010). Hence, the source of nutrients for the cultivation of microalgae can be sourced from the fertilizers available in a region. For establishing the appropriate facility for the algae industry, the consideration of the availability land per region is an important factor to consider especially that the available land in the Philippines is scarce. The supply of power for operating the biomass production facility is an important aspect of the production of algal bioproducts. This sub-criterion falls under the environmental impact category as the generation of electricity in the Philippines is mostly based on fossil fuel. Hence, the following sub-criteria are selected for environmental impact criterion to assess the alternative region R: carbon footprint, water availability, land availability, fertilizer supply, climate type, and supply of power.

Appendix 1.2: Costs of resources

The use of resources entails costs. Thus, the important operational costs of an algae-based establishment were examined such as the natural and human resource costs. The natural resource consumption considered the costs of land, water, inorganic fertilizers, and electricity. On the other hand, the minimum wage which varied per region was accounted for the cost of acquiring human resources.

Appendix 1.3: Social aspects

Social acceptance is recognized to be a contributing factor in the implementation of any renewable energy technology (Moula et al. 2013). The response of the general public may either support or constrain the implementation and use of such technologies. To capture this aspect, some of the socio-economic indicators were investigated. Since job creation is recognized as one of the benefits of the establishment of a new industry in a region, the potential labor force of an area must be considered as one of the criteria. Moreover, the eradication of poverty in conjunction with the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations is considered as a criterion in the study. Thus, the respective poverty indices of the regions were taken into account for this purpose.

Appendix 1.4: Industry presence

Microalgal biomass, consisting of high-value contents in the form of protein, carbohydrates, lipids, and pigments, can be further processed into various industrial products (Koller et al. 2014). These primary products from microalgae can further be refined to secondary products which can benefit a wide array of industries such as agriculture, energy production, and health. An effective approach to ensure the success of the establishment of new industries is the consideration of the proximity of collaborating industries. An ideal case of synergistic collaboration among different industries is the co-location of companies in an algae-based eco-industrial park (Ubando et al. 2016). The collaborating industries considered are nutraceuticals for high-valued products, aquaculture for fish feeds, animal feeds, and biofuels for bioenergy. In this regard, the respective regional performance or capacities for the aforementioned industries were considered in the model, wherein the nearer to the top-performing industries, the better.

Appendix 2: Model assumptions

The following assumptions were used in the case study:

• (1) The cultivation of microalgae was performed in an open system because of its practicality and maintainability. With the microalgal cultivation exposed to the atmospheric condition, the climate type per region would be a significant criterion in the site evaluation (Schade and Meier 2019).

• (2) The climate data type was already normalized for all regions (Cinco et al. 2013) according to the authors’ judgment of the climate experienced in all of the regions in the Philippines.

• (3) The source of carbon dioxide that could be utilized for microalgal cultivation would come from emissions of coal and diesel power plants (Philippine Department of Energy 2014a), owing to the carbon sequestration capability of microalgae as a phototrophic organism.

• (4) Representative values for the land costing per region is loosely approximated to be the ratio of the idle land area available per region with respect to the total land area per region (Philippine Department of Energy 2014a). For a conventional pairwise comparison matrix, the assignment of values followed the notion where a higher performance value is more desired. However, the scenario was made otherwise for the costs sub-criteria such that the lower the costs that is incurred, the better. For the latter analysis, the pairwise comparison matrices were transposed to obtain normalized values which can be combined with the former data.

• (5) The National Capital Region of the country was excluded from the set of alternatives assuming that there would be no available land area (Philippine Department of Energy 2014a) in the particular region to serve as cultivation and processing site for the algae industry.

• (6) The regional data for the remaining sub-criteria not mentioned in this section were obtained from various literature and Philippine government databases which belonged to a single time period only as shown in Table 2.

Appendix 3: The data sources

One of the advantages of the AHP approach is the ability to combine qualitative and quantitative data to arrive at a sound decision. The results of the survey questionnaires provided the weights for the qualitative aspect through the pairwise comparison of the criteria which followed the hierarchical structure shown in Fig. 1. The weights of the qualitative data were solved through the FAHP approach and the developed NLP model. The quantitative data comprised of the inventory lists of regional data for the identified criteria and sub-criteria shown in Table 2. Most of the quantitative data were sourced from various government agencies of the Philippines as depicted in Table 2.

The survey was conducted for 72 respondents across the Philippines. The respondents were composed of industry professionals (6), government officials (30), and researchers and faculty from the academic community (36). The survey questionnaire followed Saaty’s 9-point scale to elicit the importance of the criteria and the sub-criteria shown in Table 1. The questionnaire was structured to follow the pairwise comparison where the importance of two criteria (a pair of criteria) were evaluated at a time (Saaty 1980).