Techno-Economic Assessment on Waste from Palm Oil Mill to Electricity in Malaysia

Abstract

In the production process of palm oil, three types of biomass; Empty Fruit Bunch (EFB), Kernel Shell (KS) and Mesocarp Fiber (MF) are produced as wastes. In real society, many palm oil mills utilize only MF as fuel for internal electricity generation and other biomass are just disposed. We focus on these three kinds of biomass and conduct an economic assessment on utilizing all combined cases of the three biomass not only for internal use of generated electricity but also for selling local area via the grid. We evaluate seven cases; namely, case 1 (utilizing all biomass), case 2 (EFB and MF), case 3 (EFB and KS), case 4 (MF and KS), case 5 (only EFB), case 6 (only MF, generally used currently), case 7 (only KS). Unutilized biomass is assumed transferred to a nearest palm oil mill in simplicity. We estimated costs consisted from direct construction of generating electricity from biomass, operating, maintenance and transportation for the unutilized biomass. We calculated sales for generated electricity by assuming market price and feed-in tariff (FIT). In addition to the power sales, ash from the boiler is also assumed to be sellable as a fertilizer from expecting market price and active ingredient contents in the ash. Following results are clarified; (1) the transportation cost shared largest among all the cases (2) power is the largest among the three sales components (3) the case 1 utilizing all the biomass wastes shows generally largest profit while the case 6 commonly used recently indicates least among the cases.