PLANTATION MANAGEMENT – PALM OIL ENGINEERING BULLETIN

Palm Oil Mills and Oil Extraction Ratio

mpob_admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:13:29 +0000

This article that appeared in the Engineering Bulletin No. 70 has summarised the gist of the dilemma faced by palm oil millers from day one the modern palm oil mills made their debut in Malaysia or for that matter anywhere in the world. The refusal of some planters to accept the reality of where the mill oil is coming from, the national oil extraction rate (OER) will remain low. It is absolutely pointless to expect the fruit bunches to create more oil than what it contains. As far as oil synthesis is concerned, the moment a bunch is harvested, it cannot produce any more oil. Despite the oil palm planters having this knowledge, they still continue to point their fingers at the mill and put the blame on them when the mill OER drops. If we are sincere in our efforts under the National Key Economic Area (NKEA) to increase our national OER, the focus has to shift from the mill to the estate. This article is republished so that the industry can use the information to increase the national OER. The millers are kindly requested to convey the information to all the contributing estates.

A revolutionary concept in plantation management

mpob_admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:13:43 +0000

There is a drastic weakness in our plantation management system, including mill management as well. It is about time for the plantation management team to review the system in vogue for the past six decades or so. The existing system was suitable when Malaysian plantation industry started from coconut and moved on to rubber. At that time, engineers were non-existent in the plantation industry. The estate manager managed to operate the water pumps or generator using his engine driver who acted as his engineer for the minor engineering activities prevailing in the estates. The engineers came into the scene after the transition to oil palm as the mills needed engineers to operate the plants mainly due to the need for steam engineers to operate boilers. As the planters were mainly British, they had some fundamental knowledge about boilers as during the early days the ships plying between Britain and Malaya had steam boilers and turbines which later gave way to diesel engines. British boilers were world famous during those days.