Potential of energy recovery from an integrated palm oil mill with biogas power plant

Abstract

The Malaysian palm oil industry has made significant contribution to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) due to the increasing global demand of palm oil over the past decades. However, it is undoubtedly a sector that consumes enormous energy and water. With the uprising concerns of the energy resource shortage and global warming, several green technology policies such as the feed-in-tariff policy have been implemented by government to accelerate the sustainable development of palm oil industry in Malaysia. The establishment of feed-in-tariff has successfully increased the number of palm oil mills that are completed with biogas facilities. Recent studies indicate that there are significant amounts of waste heat released from biogas power plant are utilisable as heat source for palm oil mill processes. As an initiative to develop the research of optimizing the energy efficiency of integrated palm oil mill with the biogas power plant, this study is directed toward the analysis of energy balance and material balance of an integrated palm oil mill with biogas power plant which covered both the palm oil milling process energy demand and the biogas power plant waste heat potential analysis. An integrated palm oil mill with biogas power plant running with 120 t/h fresh fruit bunches input was evaluated. The result indicates that there were a total of 3491.66 kW waste heat which corresponded to 46.82 % of the total biogas engine energy input could be recovered for process heating. By fully utilising the biogas plant waste heat as process heating for palm oil mill processes, it is estimated that up to 9.46 % of the total energy supplied could be saved.