PALM TEC

Prepared by: Jack Neo

23 July 2007

Oil Palm

The crop starts producing oil after 3 years (economic yield) and will continue to do so for
20-25 years; which means the cultivated land will renew the crop about 20 years.
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An oil palm planting where older trees have been 2 years old palm tree bearing fruits
killed to make way for younger, smaller trees (left).

2. History in Brief
The slave trade in Africa caught the attention of palm oil as edible oil outside Africa, and
the white colonial masters began to bring the crop to many parts of the world, including
the Americas; but it was the British Industrial Revolution that first created a demand for
palm oil for soap and candle making, and as a lubricant for machinery and other technical
oils for which palm oil was found suitable. After the abolition of slave trade, palm oil
became the principal cargo on board the old slave ships. The West African farmers began
to supply modest quantity for export, as well as producing palm oil for their own food
needs.

By 1911 British West Africa alone exported 157 000 tonnes of which about 75 percent
came from Nigeria. In 1934 Malayan production of palm oil outstripped Nigeria and
became the world biggest exporter of palm oil.

European-run plantations were established in the first decade of the 20th Century in
Central Africa and Southeast Asia; the first plantations were established on Sumatra in
1911 and in Malaya in 1917, and the world trade in palm oil began to grow slowly. Nigeria
and the Belgium Congo continued to dominate the trading of palm oil until 1966 when
Malaysia and Indonesia took over the lead and have since remained the dominant
producers until today, commanding more than 85% of the world palm oil export.

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2. The Oil Palm
The Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis), since first introduced to the Far East from its native
West Africa, has grown well in most countries in the tropic within 10o north and south of
the equator. It was brought to Southeast Asia in the 19th century and was first grown in
botanical gardens in Buizenzorg (now Bogor) and Singapore. The industry did not gain full
momentum in the Far East until the 1930s.

The Fruit
The Oil Palm fruit is a sessile drupe (‘sessile’ means without stock, directly from the stem /
a drupe fruit is like the illustration below), consisting essentially of an exocarp (skin), a
fibrous mesocarp which contains palm oil, a hard stony endocarp (shell), and a kernel the
source of the kernel oil and meal. The fruit ranges in size from <1" to 2", and are obovoid
in shape.

MESOCARP-Flesh of the Fruit

Kernel of the Fruit

(a) fruiting inflorescence (“fruit bunch“)

(b) longitudincal sections of the (t) Tenera, (d) Dura and (p) Pisifera fruit forms
(Me) oil-containing mesocarp (flesh of the fruit) (En) endocarp (shell) (Esp) endosperm (kernel of the fruit)

There are three main varieties of oil palm fruits distinguished by their fruit characteristics,
namely: (a) Dura having a thick shell ‘endocarp’, separating the pulpy and fibrous
‘mesocarp’ from the ‘kernel’, the Kernel tends to be large weighing 7% - 20% of the fruit,
(b) Tenera having a thin endocarp with thick mesocarp and a small kernel 3% - 15% of
fruit, and the oil content is higher between 24% - 32%.

Pisifera has no endocarp with high tendency of being female sterile. It is not used as a
commercial crop.

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Modern high-yielding varieties developed by breeding programs, under ideal climatic
conditions and good management, are capable of producing in excess of 20 tonnes of
bunches/ha/yr, with palm oil in bunch content of 25 percent. This is equivalent to a yield of
5 tonnes oil/ha/yr (excluding the palm kernel oil), which far outstrips any other source of
edible oil.

Ideal composition of palm fruit bunch

Bunch weight 23-27 kg
Fruit/bunch 60-65 %
Oil/bunch 21-23 %
Kernel/bunch 5-7 %
Mesocarp/bunch 44-46 %
Mesocarp/fruit 71-76 %
Kernel/fruit 21-22
Shell/fruit 10-11

However, such high yields are rarely achieved in practice because climatic conditions are
usually less than ideal. Rainfall is erratic in Central and West Africa and hence the tree
suffers water-related stresses. The management of costly inputs of labour, imported
fertilizers, pesticides and harvesting machinery, is also a difficulty that hampers the yield
of plantations.

The mesocarp holds large numbers of oil cells which are full of oil when the fruit is well
ripen. The oil cells bond one another adhered to the hard fibres running lengthwise across
the mesocarp.

The Oil Palm produces either a male or female or at certain stages hermaphrodite
inflorescence in each of the frond axil at maturity (normally 21/2 to 3 years old, good
commercial breed). The ratio of female inflorescences to the total inflorescences (the sex
ratio) determines the yield. High sex ratio produces high yield.

The female inflorescence upon pollinated and fertilised, each flower produces a drupe,
each female inflorescence produce a large number of fruits (fruitlets – terminology used
in the industry), organised in a hard bunch (known as the Fresh Fruit Bunch - FFB). The
fruitlets ripen in 5 - 6 months after pollination. Each female inflorescence produces 200-
300 fruitlets.

Ripening Fruit Bunch Fresh Fruit Bunch (FFB)

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Flowers
Oil palms are monoecious, producing male and female inflorescences. The inflorescence
of both sexes is a compound spadix with 100-200 branches, initially enclosed in a spathe
or bract that splits 2 weeks prior to anthesis.

Male inflorescence Female inflorescence

The inflorescences are borne in the leaf axils (an inflorescence primordium is produced in
the axil of each leaf at the time of leaf initiation); each will produce either a male or female
inflorescence. The total number of inflorescences produced per palm is dependent upon
the number of leaves produced and the success rate of the number reaching maturity.
Inflorescences are initially tightly enclosed in an outer and inner spathe; at anthesis the
spathes start to disintegrate and fall off.

Male inflorescences consist of finger-like spineless cylindrical spikes, 10–20 cm long,

arranged on a central axis; each spike has 700–1.200 closely packed small male flowers
sunk in the spike axis tissue; each male flower has 6 anthers and a rudimentary
gynoecium with 3 projections corresponding to the trilobed stigma in female flowers.

Female inflorescences, in contrast, are ovoid heads due to the congested spikelets, each
in the axil of a spiny bract and with 12 or less flowers. The females flowers, with 3+3
tepals (calyx leaves), have a rudimentary androecium comprised of (6–10) short
projections and a tricarpellary ovary (of which only one carpel usually develops) with a
sessile 3-lobed stigma.

Flower Bunch

Fr uit
Bunch

(f) female inflorescence A developed 'Flower Bunch'

(m) male inflorescence, ready to fall off

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Pollination
Oil palms are primarily insect pollinated by various insects: in Africa, weevils (Elaeidobius
spp).

Fruitlets normally starts to generate oil about 12 week after anthesis: kernel oil first and
the process takes about four weeks to complete; and oil cells start to develop for oil
deposition in the mesocarp about 15 weeks after anthesis and oil generation in the oil
cells continues until fruit maturity which is about 20 weeks after anthesis. However, oil
production in the fruitlets stops when they are removed from the tree.

When the fruitlets ripen, the lipolytic enzymes in the mesocarp start to generate free fatty
acid (FFA) in the fruit. The fruitlets in the outer layer of the bunch ripen earlier than those
in the inner layers. These enzymatic activities increase rapidly when the fruitlets are
removed from the tree or when they are bruised; this in turn generates more FFA in the
fruit. It is well known that free fatty acid content in palm oil is indicative of its quality. High
free fatty acids content in CPO will increase bleaching and deodorization cost in refining.

Soils
Soil - wide range of soil types provided good drainage and pH between 4 and 7; tolerates
periodic flooding or a high water table; many soils are alluvial in nature. Irrigation is
generally not practiced.

Climate
Climate - hot, wet tropical lowlands, at least 6 ft of rain per year, evenly distributed, with at
least 4" per month; optimal temperatures are in the 80s-90s °F, 5-7 hr of direct sunlight
per day is beneficial.

Propagation
Oil palm is propagated for commercial cultivation by using F1 hybrid seed from controlled
crosses that produce tenera species (dura x pisifera). Pregerminated oil palm seeds are
sold by companies that specialize in hybrid seed production,

The Harvest
From nursery to plantation, the crop begins its economic life after about three years, peaks
at the age of 8 years and then stabilizes before declining after 20 years. The harvesting is
about every 10 to 15 days (twice a month). Harvesting is manual, the field workers,
equipped with the necessary implement, inspects the fruit bunches to see which are ripe,
cuts and takes away in whole fruit bunch, along with any fallen fruits.

The fruit bunches have to be harvested at the right time, when the fruits begin to fall off
naturally: this means that oil synthesis is complete and oil content has peaked. The
harvested fresh fruit bunches (FFB) are then transported to a mill.

Provided the fruit bunches are low enough, they are cut with a chisel or machete. If they
are too high up, a hooked knife on the end of a bamboo or aluminium pole is used, adding
extra sections once the palms reach a height of 8 metres or more.

It is not the falling in production that prompts growers to replant after 25 years or so, but
the difficulty of harvesting palms more than 12 metres tall.

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3. Palm Oil Milling
There are three broad divisions of businesses in the palm oil industry; namely:
 The Plantation (up stream),
 Crude palm oil ‘CPO’ & Palm Kernel Oil ‘PKO’ milling (the mid stream), and
 The downstream refineries and processing of CPO and PKO, and the various
industries using the mill waste, like the nut shells, empty fruit bunches ‘EFB’ and
possibly the other mill effluents.

Our proposed business focus on the palm oil industry is strictly on the technological
development and the participation of the Palm Oil milling activities, either the ECP of palm
mill construction or milling operation participation.

Milling Process

Historical Development
It would be interesting to trace the historical development of palm oil extraction from the
time the oil was first extracted for food consumption in its native West Africa.
The unrefined palm oil obtained from fresh palm fruit has been used in the West African
cooking, and some local cuisines still use this oil without further treatment, or at most, a
simple filtering or settling operation to remove any solid impurities.

Palm oil sold at the bazaar Palm oil extraction using Spindle press in operation
spindle press

As in the above pictures, the fruits were pounded in a stone mortar and extracted by means of spindle press.

In the old days in West Africa, the oil palm fruit bunches were collected from the wild palm
trees, and were left to ferment in a heap for 6 to 7 days. When the fruitlets had softened,
they were plucked from the fermented bunches and then pounded in mortar. The pounded
mash was then collected in a clay-lined pit or an old canoe to allow the oil to drain off or
squeezed out manually of the fibrous mash. Water might be added to the mash to assist
the oil separation, and the oil-water mixture was boiled till dry. This produced "hard" oil,
containing about 20% free fatty acids.

Alternatively, the fruitlets were taken off the bunch after 2 to 3 days, and boiled in water
until soft. They were then pounded in a mortar, and the oil is extracted the same way as
above. This produced “Soft” oil, containing about 7-10% free fatty acid.

These oils had strong flavour, and still highly appreciated in local dishes today.
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Today, in the villages in West Africa, the oil palm is cultivated as a crop, and palm oil
extraction in many ways resembles the old, but simple mechanisation are used in the
better organised trading environment. The following recent pictures do tell the story.

Manual And Simple Mechanisation In The Palm Fruit Harvest And Oil Extraction In The West African Villages

While it seems Palm oil processing in West Africa has remained somewhat primitive and
backward in the villages, the modern palm oil mills of large oil palm estates are just like
those found in Malaysia and Indonesia.

The development of the modern palm oil mill dated back to the first decade of the 20th
Century when William Lever (the founder of Lever Brothers, Uilever after 1929) obtained
land concession to grow large-scale plantation in the Belgium Congo in 1911, after he
failed to obtain land concession from the British Colonial Office in the British West Africa in
1907 to produce palm oil for his Lancashier soap mill.

Lever’s long process of experimentation in Congo led to the innovations which brought
about new planting materials and improved machinery, which increased the palm fruit
production dramatically and higher oil quality at competitive price. The Lever endeavour in
the Belgium Congo ushered in the palm oil revolution worldwide. The palm oil milling
technology used in the last 60 years have remained pretty much the same as the earlier
modern mills developed in the Belgium Congo in the 1950s.
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Lever was originally more interested in setting up mills than plantations in the Congo, but
his initial investments suffered heavy losses because the fruit supply to his mill were poor
in quality and small in quantity; furthermore, the fruits were either overripe or badly bruised
which produced highly acidic and low quality oil, and the unripe fruits returned low yield in
oil.

In 1922, the Belgium Colonial Office began to investigate an exceptionally thin shell palm
breed with high oil content (later came to be known as the Tenera), identified earlier by the
German in Cameroon in 1902. In 1930, Lever exploited this golden discovery and started
planting large scale of Tenera breed cultivation in Cameroon and the Belgium Congo
under the flagship, the United Africa Company, a subsidiary of Unilever.

Meanwhile, Tenera seed had also found its way to Sumatra and Malaya in the 1920s, but
it did not do well as a cultivation crop, because Tenera was a hybrid of two other types,
the Dura (thick-shelled fruit with low oil content) and the Pisifera (Shell-less fruit of no
economic value); self-pollinated in the Tenera, produced 50% Tenera, 25% Dura and 25%
Pisifera, and would not breed true.

The Research Station in the Congo under M. Beimaett had established a large scale and
long-term breeding program to exploit this wonder discovery of the Tenera, and after the
war in 1945, the new breed in palm cultivation became widespread as the palm oil
‘crusader’ that brought about the whole new chapter in the palm oil industry, especially the
new milling technology to process the large volume of fruits produced in large-scale
plantation of the crop.

Processing Technology
Until the early years of the twentieth century, palm oil was processed only by traditional
village methods, by which loose fruits were collected from the ground or a few bunches
were cut from the tree. Beginning in the 1920s, however, the United Africa Company and
British colonial officials in Nigeria started experimenting with steam cookers and hand
presses designed to make production at the village level more efficient in labour and oil
yield. Nevertheless, only a small number of the farmers could have the privilege to try the
new machinery, especially those few lucky recipients of the free samples of such new
inventions, or the recipients of government subsidies for procurement of such machinery
in the 1940s.
By the process of trial and error, the milling technology was developed to deal with the
volume of fruit produced from the well developed plantations. This led to the development
of the sophisticated factories required to produce oil of the high and standardized quality
that would appeal to Western food processors. Such factories, the palm oil mills today,
process almost all the palm fruits of Southeast Asia. Whatever the scale and
sophistication of the process, the following steps are the main features:
1. Sterilisation of the fruits to destroy the lipolitic enzyme in the ripe fruits, which
otherwise acidifies the oil in the fruits to produce free fatty acid (FFA).
2. Softening the fruitlets so as to facilitate easy removal (the individual drupes) from
the fruit bunches.
3. Macerating the sterilised/softened fruitlets to facilitate the extraction of the oil from
the mesocarp, and the isolation of the nut containing the kernel for subsequent
extraction of the oil (PKO) from the kernel.
4. The extraction of CPO.
5. The processing of nuts for PKO extraction.
6. The purification of CPO.
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 A B C D

E F G H

I J K L

The above processing of the palm fruits in a palm oil mill (palm oil milling in a highly
organized system) entails:

A. The FFB harvested in the plantation or small holdings are transported to a palm oil
mill within 24 hours of the harvest, usually by truck.

B. The FFB are discharged at the unloading ramp at the mill.

C. The FFB are charged into sterilising cages which run on rail track.

D. The sterilising cages loaded with FFB are transferred to the sterilising bay of the
mill, either manually on the rail tracks or utilising some motorised contrivance like
tractor or winches.
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E. The FFB loaded in the sterilising cages are sterilised at about 100 C, slightly above
ambient pressure using steam in a horizontal cylindrical ‘autoclave-like’ steriliser,
with pressure-lock door at one end or both ends; or in sterilisers without pressure-
lock door, in which case, some means of steam curtain is installed at the entry
point, usually with rubberised screen.

This ‘sterilisation process’ inactivates the lipolitic enzyme in the fruitlets, stopping
further deterioration of the oil quality due to the enzymatic production of FFA, and
at the same time softening the fruitlets for easy stripping from the bunch.

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F. The sterilised FFB are then transferred to a rotary drum stripper of diameter of
about 6ft and a length of 9 to 16ft. The sterilised FFB in the rotary drum tumble as
the drum rotates, and the fruitlets are dislodged from the bunch due to the tumbling
impact. The empty fruit bunches (EFB) are then discharged from the other end of
the rotating drum. The longer the drum, the stripping is more complete. The
stripped sterilised fruitlets are discharged through the openings of the drum
peripheral surface and conveyed to a Digester (a vertical rotary fruit
mashing/pulping cylinder, heat is added by means of steam jacket or direct steam
injection into the cylinder, as depicted in ‘G’ – the stainless steel cylinder above the
yellow twin screw press).

G. The softened fruitlets are macerated in the digester by means of rotary agitation of
the numerous pairs of steel macerator assembly (known in the industry as ‘the
long and short arms’). The function of the long and short arms is to break up the
pulp physically (without cracking the nuts), thereby release the oil from the oil
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bearing cells. The digester content is kept at a temperature (usually 90-100 C) by
means of steam-jacket around the cylinder or direct injection of steam into the
digester to raise the temperature of the mash to facilitate subsequent pressing, and
the macerated mash is drawn into the twin screw press close-coupled to the bottom
discharge end of the digester.

The twin screw press expels the oil and moisture through the perforated screw
cage by squeezing the digested pulp drawn from the digester, and discharge the
fibrous residue with the nuts embedded (this press residue discharge is known as
the ‘presscake’. The nuts and fibrous residue are separated in further processing.

The oil collected is pumped to the purification for purification.

The processing capacity of the screw press is rated in terms FFB tonnage per
hour, the capacity of a palm oil mill is in turn rated in terms of total FFB tonnage
that could be processed by the installed capacity of the screw presses in the mill.

H. The discharged press cake is transferred to the air classifiers and cyclones for
drying and separation of nuts and fibers. The fiber residue is used as fuel in the
boiler (‘J’ in the picture above) to produce steam for the mill and to generate
electricity for the mill and the mill community.

I. The separated nuts are transferred to the nut cracking facilities to recover the
kernels, and the shells are sent to the boiler as fuel. The kernels are then
transferred to the silo for bagging.

K The palm milling process produces by-products (both solid and liquid), and some of
them become nasty effluents if not well-treated. Notably, the two by-products,
presscake fiber waste and nut shells are normally consumed as fuels in the boiler.
The EFB are normally composted as fertilizer for the crop, but in many instances,
EFB has become a nuisance and pollution to the environment. The liquid affluent
from the steam condensate in the steriliser, moisture from the fruits, process and
wash water, and the entrained oil and solid from the processing is the main effluent
treatment issue in a palm mill. Marked improvement has been achieved in the
effluent treatment in most modern mills, but the new cry of zero effluent is certainly
the benchmark palm oil miller is looking out for solution. Effluent treatment is

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 expensive, and it is a significant cost item which all palm mill owners want to turn
this adversity into their advantage.

L. Oil purification – The oil extracted from the screw press contains impurities,
especially solids and water. Water and solid impurities (sand, stone fragments,
solid residues from palm fruits are first separated from the oil by natural
decantation, and the decanted oil is further screened and centrifuged to complete
the purification. The oil is finally dried in a vacuum dyer and stored.

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