Pellet is defined as a small piece of material make by compressed material such as saw dust, of efb fibre.  An EFB pellet is a pellet make from the EBF fiber.  Many readers should have known about pellet but very new to EFB.  In this article, we are going to talk more about EFB fiber and EFB Pellet.

Short EFB Fiber for Pellet

What is EFB fiber?

EFB is the abbreviation for Empty Fruit Bunch from oil palm fruit.  An oil palm fruit will be processed for crude palm oil and the remaining bunch is discarded as empty fruit bunch.  The empty fruit bunch is at wet form and goes through subsequent process for biomass application.

From the nature of empty fruit bunch, the EFB will go through several more processes to distill the long EFB fibre and the remaining short EFB fibre will be putting aside for biomass purpose.

Short EFB fibre is always comes in loose fibre stage, even though short EFB fibre is a good source of renewable energy however the loose stage has make it less usable in practical stage.

Converting Loose EFB fiber to EFB Pellet

Biomass engineer has developed a chopper or crusher machine for chopping down the fibre into smaller in length.  The shorter EFB fibre can directly put into the palletize machine and goes through the palletize process.  EFB pellet is the outcome product.  EFB pellet also use the raw material for biomass boiler.

In most cases, in order to have a better quality of pellet, short EFB fiber will go through a crushing process to shorten the fibre length, this will improve the EFB pellet quality.

Why EFB pellet but not Wood pellet?

A compressed and palletize efb pellet has been classified as renewable energy.  Pellet will provide more consistent and predictable result while comes to practical use.  Further more, Malaysia is a world leading in oil palm plantation and crude palm oil production.  EFB is the discard by-product for crude palm oil process.

Currently shredded EFB has been used for local domestic biomass, however shredded EFB is not preferable for export market.  The EFB will be further process to EFB pellet which favourable for export market.

Comparing EFB pellet to wood pellet, wood pellet is dominating the market for past few years.  We are seeing EFB pellet start coming into the market, and we expected to see more in coming years especially for industrial or power plant.

For house user, we think wood pellet still be the first choice.  This is because household biomass boiler is more demanding than industrial biomass boiler.

EFB pellet is manufacture from EFB fibre through series of processes.  Base on the EFB raw material availability, we have no surprise Malaysia becomes one of the main EFB pellet manufacturer for world renewable energy market.