Hi, my name is Wahyuni Howard, XL Future Leaders Batch 3 from Bandung Region. A few days ago, I won the first place from Problem Solving category of Indonesia Chemical Engineering Challenge (IChEC) 2016, as a team named PS9, with my second year junior, Stephen Ariel Kristiandi. IChEC is a big annual event for Chemical Engineering students from all over South-East Asia, which is organized by Chemical Engineering Union – Bandung Institute of Technology. There are four competition categories during this event, which are plant design competition, problem solving competition, debate competition, and poster competition. This year theme of IChEC is “Empowering the Nation through Coal-Based Chemical Industry”, which intends to remind us about Indonesian coal potential. Main events, including final competition, Gala Dinner, and Grand Seminar, were held in Bandung at 16-19 March 2016. The Grand Seminar with topic of “Pengembangan Industri Kimia Berbasis Batubara untuk Mewujudkan Kemandirian Industri Kimia Nasional” closed the events remarkably.

Our team has been selected as top five grand finalists in Problem Solving category based on submitted proposal, together with other finalists from Chulalongkorn University Thailand, Gajah Mada University, and three teams from Bandung Institute Technology (including our team). Besides Thailand, there were also participants from Malaysia and Philippines joining this competition. The submitted proposal was a review and selection of Indonesian coal to methanol processing technology. When working on the technology selection part of our research, we implemented PMI (Plus-Minus-Interesting) thinking tools which have been trained in XL curriculum.

All finalist conducted proposal presentation in English during the final round and the judges were free to ask questions at the end of presentation. I shared and trained my group partner to apply presentation style experience I got from XL Future Leaders program, which were TED Talk and Pecha Kucha. We got a chance as the first team to deliver the presentation. Hard work, critical thinking, full preparation, well-balanced team work, beloved supports, and also experiences from XL workshop made us successfully achieved the title as the first winner of Problem Solving competition.

As the result based on inquiry learning process we did during this competition, Indonesia actually has a huge amount of coal. However, coals in Indonesia are defined as low-rank-coal with almost zero value due to its high moisture content characteristic. In contrast, Indonesia coal production increases annually. One way to utilize the coal is the production of chemical substance, such as methanol. Methanol is an intermediate component. Thus, it could be converted to other chemical substances according to the nation demand. Indonesia has low production of methanol. There are also another ways to utilize it, by converting coal into energy.

As the First Winner we deserve Rp. 10,000,000.- prize and certificate of achievement. This competition is an excellent reminder about how important Chemical Engineering role to take action on solving nation’s problems.