Palm Oil Refinery

REFINERY AND LOCATION:

Land and Plant:
This world-class palm oil refinery with fractionation in Calabar, Nigeria.
This refinery is a 400-metric-ton-per day vegetable oil physical refinery and fractionation plant, situated on a 7.8 Hectares waterfront site with an on-site jetty for delivery of CPO shipments.
The site had dedicated storage for:
1. 20,000 tons of crude oil
2. 11,000 tons of refined products
3. 1,400 tons of intermediate products

The refinery is located on 7.8 hectares of land along the waterfront of the Calabar River in the Odukpani Local Government area of Cross River State, South Nigeria.
The property lies adjacent to TINAPA Business Resort. In addition to the refinery itself, This Refinery has been constructed a dedicated jetty, with all relevant facilities to enable the delivery of CPO and shipment of finished products. This jetty will be for the exclusive use of the Palm Oil Refinery and will have its own customs checkpoint. The plant is easily accessible with a good network of roads leading to the site.
OTHER FEATURES:
- Compliant with the stringent requirements of NAFDAC
- Supply agreements with key respected Asian suppliers
- Total storage capacity for a total of 32,400 metric tons of oil, with additional storage facilities located in Kano and Lagos
- Ideally located at a waterfront site (find attached quotations for jetty expansion)

Plant Layout:
The plant has been laid out in line with global best practice to ensure optimal operational efficiency and space utilization. Although the plant has a current refining capacity of 400MT per day its layout has taken into account the planned refining capacity expansion to 1,000 Metric tons per day. Details of the configuration and site plan can be found in the appendix.
Equipment:

A prominent Metal Industries company [KMIPL] headquartered in Mumbai, India, has fabricated the refinery. Founded in 1939, (KMIPL) is a globally established engineering and manufacturing company with expertise in fabricating, installing and operating Oil Mills, Solvent Extraction and Edible Oil Refining plants. A list of some notable refining projects completed by Kumar is shown in the appendix.
Today KMIPL is in over 25 countries and serves over 500 customers. KMIPL is an ISO 9001-2008 approved company with CE and ATEX certifications. Over the years the company has received several awards and certificates from the Government of India and the Engineering Export Promotion Council.
KMIPL is in technical collaboration with Crown Iron Works Company USA, one of the world leaders in oil extraction and refining, to manufacture Solvent extraction and vegetable oil refining plants of capacities ranging from 500 to 6000 Tons per day.

The plant installed by KMIPL is a physical refinery with the most technologically advanced modules of refining vegetable oils. Refining is achieved by the sole exploitation of the physical properties of the oil, as opposed to chemical refining which has inherent contaminations and higher production losses. A list of some of the major machines and equipment that make up the physical refinery is shown below:

Equipment and function:
1. Basket filters: Filters out foreign and suspended impurities from the Crude Palm Oil
2. Pre heaters: Heats the oils to bleaching temperature
3. Conditioning Tank: Facilitates the reaction of phosphoric acid and oil gums for easy filtration.
4. Bleacher: Partially bleaches the oils but this mainly ensures easy filtration of gums, suspended solids, moisture and reduces the peroxide value.
5. Filter leafs: Filters out the bleaching earth together with suspended solids, gums and moisture
6. De-aerator: Removes traces of air (oxygen) from oil and also acts as buffer tank for next stage of refining.
7. Flash pot: Pre-heats the oil to final deodorization temperature. This is also where most of the free fatty acids are distilled or "flashed off" and carotenes (colour of oil) are denatured.
8. Deodorizer: This achieves the final state of refining where all free fatty acids, colours, odour; peroxide values are tuned (reduced) to the pre-set quality parameters.
9. Coolers: These cool off refined oils to ambient temperatures. At this stage, stabilizers like citric acid and supplements like vitamins are dozed.
10: Vacuum equipment: Develops and maintain near absolute vacuum conditions within the process line. This comprises boosters, ejectors, condensers and cooling towers.
11: Polishing Filters: These filter out any precipitates and make the refined oil cystal clear.
12: PLC/PC Control panels: Provides easy and automatic control of flow rates, temperatures, liquid levels etc.
13. Heat Exchanger/Economizers: These devices are strategically located along the process and transfer heat from the deodorized oil to the incoming oil, thus the name economizers. Approximately 80% of the heat imputed to achieve bleaching and deodorization temperatures is transferred back to the incoming cold oil. That makes the refinery very energy efficient.
14. Transfer pumps: Numerous pumps are located along the process line and boiler houses.
15. Two Boilers: Steam generating and thermic fluid heater boilers are provided.

Overview of the production process:
The plant is calibrated for a capacity of 400 Metric tons per day. There are no bottlenecks in the production process, allowing the plant to run a constant equilibrium flow rate of 18,500 litres per hour. A brief description of the production process is described as follows: A more detailed process flow may be found in the appendix.

Preparation: The first stage of refining involves preparation, where the crude palm oil to be refined is filled into one of the service tanks. After sampling for full analysis, it is then heated to about 40oC through heating oils and kept under circulation. The boiler is pressurized; cooling towers primed and kept on circulation. A vacuum is developed throughout the refinery vessels and equipment.
Pre-treatment:
During pre-treatment, the feed oil is heated to 65-70oC in the Economiser by outgoing deodorized oil, followed by the feed heater (during start up). Concentrated phosphoric acid (0.5 - 0.10%) is injected by the Acid Metering Pump and intensively mixed with the oil in the Acid Mixer before entering the Conditioning Reactor. The oil is discharged into the slurry mixer above the Bleacher.
Bleaching: The pre-treated oil, which contains yellow, green and red pigments is then subjected to the bleaching process. Bleaching is a physical absorption process where the oil is heated to the required bleaching temperature and then bleaching earth is applied to adsorb the colouring bodies.
This is oil then passes through pressure leaf filters and then the polishing filter.
Deodorization: After neutralization, pre-treatment and bleaching, the oil contains free fatty acid, few colouring bodies and odoriferous substances. These odoriferous substances impart colour and a foul smell to the oil and need to be removed through Deodorization. In this process, oil is subjected to de-aeration, regeneration and final heating for de-acidification / deodorization using high vacuum, open steam with suitable residence time. This oil is then cooled and antioxidants are added to increase the shelf life of refined oil.

Waste:
Waste produced from the plant will be the spent bleaching earth, which is activated clay. It is non-toxic and has no negative environment impact. About 4 tons of spent bleaching earth will be produced per day which will be disposed of in pits within the premises.
Fractionation: Separation of the Palm Olein from Palm Stearin is done using a membrane filter. In the fractionation process, oil is first heated to give it the homogenous texture. The oil is then cooled by the cooling tower and chilled water in a crystallizer oil is then filtered by a membrane filter where the Palm Olein gets filtered and Palm Stearin remains in the membrane.

End Products
From 400 Metric Tons of Crude Palm Oil processed in one day, the refinery will produce 384MT of RBDO (96% of CPO) and 12MT of PFAD (3% of CPO). Approximately 4MT (1% of CPO) would be processing loss due to impurities that may be contained in the Crude Palm Oil.
Once RBDO has gone through fractionation, it can be broken down further to produce about 280MT of Olein and 104MT of Stearin. A further processing loss of about 1% will occur during fractionation. This is calculated as 96% RBDO and 4% PFAD after the first refining. Once the 96% RBDO is sent to the fractionation plant it will produce 76% of Palm Olein and 24% of Palm Stearin.

Jetty
Furthermore, there is a jetty attached to this property -- with a further expansion plan in motion -- find attached the project plan.