Enconfund revs up energy projects
The Energy Conservation and Promotion Fund Office (Enconfund) is accelerating efforts to move energy ideas from the lab to the marketplace, including a plan to replace diesel with oil produced from waste. For more than three decades, Enconfund has backed energy conservation and alternative energy initiatives by collecting a small levy from fuel users, currently set at 0.05 baht per litre.
Today the fund sits at just over 10 billion baht in cash and typically spends between 5 and 9 billion baht each year to back projects. Yet the fund’s revenue—roughly 1.7 to 1.8 billion baht annually—may struggle to keep pace with growing demand in the coming years.
“Many projects we sponsor are strong at the research level but face hurdles when scaling up for the market because of cumbersome government procedures,” said Rattachat Siripanich, Enconfund’s manager. He noted that the organisation aims to reconstitute itself as a legal entity within 2027–28 to gain greater operational flexibility. The move, first approved in 2016, has stalled amid changes in government and political cycles.
At present, the fund operates under the Energy Policy and Planning Office (Eppo). The planned transformation would simplify governance by reducing duplication and conflicts of interest, since Eppo is the body that both requests and approves fund disbursements.
Despite the administrative hurdles, Enconfund has backed several promising projects. Suranaree University of Technology is piloting a waste-to-oil process that uses pyrolysis to convert plastic waste into light crude oil. The new oil can be produced at roughly 12 baht per litre and sold for 20–25 baht per litre, offering farmers a cheaper alternative to diesel, which exceeds 40 baht per litre.
Kasetsart University is pursuing a green hydrogen program that employs solar-powered electrolysis to split water, with the goal of storing hydrogen energy for periods when sunlight is scarce.
Rattachat acknowledged that the energy sector is evolving rapidly, which makes navigating Thailand’s bureaucratic landscape challenging. Nevertheless, Enconfund intends to accelerate the development of a new organizational framework and present it to the fund’s board and the cabinet, hoping to unlock more opportunities for commercial-scale deployment in the years ahead.
