Palm oil production in Malaysia scored 17.9 million ton in 2009, which was ranked as No.2 in the world, following after Indonesia’s record of 22 million ton. Today Malaysia exports 90 % of the domestic palm oil which occupies 9.2% of the export total sum. The most export is electricity and electronic parts, which is 41.2% of the export total sum. The palm oil export is the second largest, and palm oil production is regarded as the most important national industry.

Palm oil is a kind of plant oil that is extracted from fruits of oil palm. On the other hand, “palm kernel oil” is extracted from seeds of oil palm. After extracting both kind of oil, a lot of waste woody biomass is leftover. The leftover from palm oil production is called EFB (empty fruit bunch), and that from palm kernel oil production is called PKC (palm kernel cake). In addition, there remain other waste materials such as branches and leaves of palm trees, as well as palm oil mill effluent (POME). Furthermore, old palm trees are cut down and replaced by young trees at an interval of 25 years. Consequently, a large quantity of cut-down old palm trees is generated at times. Recent investigation proved that trunks of old palm trees keep a lot of sap (75~80 % of tree weight) that contains rich amount of fermentable sugar such as glucose.

Malaysia produced 17.9 million ton of palm oil as well as 2.1 million ton of palm kernel oil in 2009, at the same time, quite a lot of waste biomass was generated, including 2.3 million ton of PKC, 30 million ton of EFB and waste fruit fiber and etc. Owing to new technology these waste biomass has become quite valuable today. The sum of all waste biomass emitted from palm oil industry of Malaysia, including POME, amounted to 65.5 million ton in 2009. If the waste material were turned into electricity by new technology, Malaysia would be able to supply additional 2,400 MW installed capacity per year.

In recent years Malaysian government has been keenly promoting utilization of renewable energy. In 2009. Malaysia could produce 498.9 MW installed capacity of electricity and 400 G joule of heat by utilizing various waste biomass, which amounted to 12.3 million ton in total, emitted from palm oil industry, sugar industry and municipalities. Malaysia invested 2.8 billion Ringitt (Malaysian money), =94 billion yen, for this project. Concerning the utilization of new energy, 18 new projects were selected and funded with a sum of 376.6 million Ringitt (12.6 billion yen) by the government. These projects created a new employment of 3449 persons. One of the projects, with a budget of 52 million Ringitt (1.7 billion yen), was designed to generate 11.5 MW installed capacity of electricity by utilizing 432,000 ton of waste emitted from palm oil mills.

Fig.  Oil Products and Waste Biomass Obtained from Palm Fruits and Seeds

Fig.  The amount of Re-Used Waste and Energy Use
(Malaysia in 2009)

Source:
1) Website of JOPA (Japan Oilseeds Processors Association): http://www.oil.or.jp/
2) Biomass-Asia Workshop 2009, 6th, (Hiroshima, November 2009)
3) Malaysia Performance of the Manufacturing and Services Sectors (2009)
et al