Our palm oil mill is located within our oil palm plantation premises that is easily accessible by our network of service roads within our palm oil plantation to reduce our transport costs and allows for the timely processing of the FFB, thereby maintaining the quality of our CPO.
- Sterilising and threshing
FFB are placed in a steel cage and 'cooked' under pressurised steam for 90 minutes at a temperature of 145 degrees celsius - a process known as sterilisation - to soften the FFB and loosen the fruits from the stalk of the FFB. The softened FFB then undergoes threshing whereby these FFB are rolled and threshed in a revolving slated steel drum to separate the fruits from the bunch stalks. The fruits are then transported to the fruit digester.
- Fruit digestion
Fruits are placed in a steel vat known as a fruit digester into which steam is injected and then mashed by sets of stirring mechanical arms to loosen the fibre from the nuts of the fruits. The oil extracted from such mashing then undergoes purification.
- Pressing
The fibre-nut mash is placed in a perforated press cage and pressed to squeeze the oil and moisture from the fibre-nut mash, leaving a compacted mass known as the press cake. The oil extracted from such pressing undergoes purification.
- Purification
The oil collected from the fruit digestion and pressing processes is sieved to remove any remnant fibre and nut particles, and then collected in a tank. Steam is injected into the tank and the resulting oil-water mixture is left to settle for approximately five (5) hours. On settling, clean oil will collect at the top of the tank whereas oil sludge will settle at the bottom of the tank. The clean oil then undergoes centrifuging in a high-speed centrifuge to separate any impurities from the oil and is then passed through a vacuum drier to reduce moisture content. The purified oil obtained from the foregoing process is known as CPO which is then stored in the oil storage tanks pending delivery to our customers.
- Depericarper separation
The press cake from the pressing process is fed into a rotating steel drum known as a depericarper to separate the nuts from the fibre.
- Drying
The nuts from the depericarper separation are collected and stored in the nut silo for drying to facilitate the cracking and separation of the palm kernel from the nut shell.
- Rippling and winnowing
The dried nuts are fed into mills to crack the nutshells. The cracked nuts are then fed into a blowing machine known as a winnower where the lighter shell fragments and any remaining fibre are blown off by air-jets, leaving only the palms kernels with parts of the nutshells still attached.
- Hydro-cyclone separation
The palm kernels with parts of nutshell still attached are then placed in a hydro-cyclone where water is pumped in at high pressure to separate the palm kernels from the remaining portions of the nutshells. The palm kernels are then collected and sent to storage before delivery to our customers.
After processing, the CPO and palm kernels are generally transported from our palm oil mill to the port which are owned and operated by third parties. We store the CPO in storage tanks at our palm oil mill and port pending shipment.