Published December 2022
This Process Economics Program (PEP) review provides a techno-economic assessment of production of refined bleached deodorized palm oil (RBDPO) via palm oil mill (POM) and palm oil refinery (POR) processes. Two cases are considered in this review: a Base Case with a conventional POM and POR process and a Decarbonization Case, for which an additional biogas plant is considered at the POM to capture carbon and methane emissions from palm oil mil effluent (POME) and for the POR a biomass boiler is considered instead of the conventional natural gas (NG) boiler. A comparative techno-economic assessment has been made between both the cases. The production economics assessment has been done for a plant based at a US Gulf Coast (USGC) location, with an annual production capacity of 967 million pounds of RBDPO. An iPEP navigator module, which is an Excel-based computer costing model developed by IHS Markit, is also attached with this report to allow quick calculation of the process economics for other major regions—Germany, Japan, and mainland China—along with conversion between English and metric units.
The technological and economic assessments of the processes are the PEP team’s independent interpretation of a potential commercial process based on the information presented in the open literature, such as patents or technical articles. Although they may not reflect in whole or in part of the actual plant configuration, we do believe that they are sufficiently representative of the process and process economics within the range of accuracy necessary for economic evaluations of the conceptual process designs.