A Chemical Engineer in the Palm Oil Milling Industry

By Hong Wai Onn

Palm oil is a big business. Palm oil has been widely used in food and non-food industries. More than half the products on sale in supermarkets are made with palm oil—yet many people hardly know anything about this industry. They don't even know chemical engineers have a significant role to play in this industry. This book provides a series of episodes for you to discover the opportunities chemical engineers have in the palm oil milling industry. This book is an illuminating memoir that brings readers closer to the most enigmatic profession of all time.

 

It is a promise that Hong Wai Onn has fulfilled again and again. More people have gained a better understanding of the role of chemical engineers in the palm oil milling industry by listening to his sharing. You do not have to be a chemical engineer or work in this industry to enjoy his memoir. The insights are just as valuable for any discipline of engineering, and for any business, for the sake of inspiration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hong Wai Onn
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9789671818817

Hong Wai Onn

Hong Wai Onn is a chemical engineer by training and profession. He is a passionate advocate who believes in harnessing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to advance development of the palm oil processing industry by ensuring greater participation by young people, especially chemical engineers. He has close to 15 years of operational experience in palm oil and biotechnology industries covering a very wide spectrum of responsibilities including production, engineering, project management, applied research, process safety, and leadership roles. He is the current Honorary Secretary of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) in Malaysia Board and Chair of IChemE Palm Oil Processing Special Interest Group. He sits on the Industry Advisory Panel for Chemical Engineering at several public and private universities. 

Book preview

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my beloved parents, Hong Soo Har and Chan Tee Yong. For the first time, I am speechless. I can barely find the right words to express all the wisdom, love, and support they have given me. They are my number one fans, and for that, I am eternally grateful. I love you, Daddy and Mommy.

Writing a book is harder than I thought, but more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. None of this would have been made possible without my wife, Loh Sook Yee, who gave me the impetus to write this book. It was she who actually inspired me to action by directing me to stop talking about writing a book, and just start writing. She has been a continuous source of motivation throughout my writing journey. Thanks for not just believing, but knowing, that I could do this. I love you always and forever.

A very special thanks to my elder sister, Hong Pei San, and younger sister, Hong Pei Ping, who I could turn to during my dark and desperate years. You sustained me in ways that I never knew I needed.

I would like to take this opportunity to extend my sincere thanks to Mr. KH Teoh, Mr. Choo Huan Boon, and Mr. James Chung Khim Hon who coached me extensively during my tenure with Genting Plantations Berhad. They never saw my age or lack of experience in palm oil milling, but only saw a youth who was hungry to learn, to grow, and to succeed in my profession. They never stopped me; they only encouraged me.

Writing a book about the story of my life is a surreal process. I’m forever indebted to Mahbob Abdullah for his guidance, keen insight, and ongoing support in bringing my stories to life. I am also delighted and honoured to have him write the foreword to this book.

Finally, to all of the individuals I have had the opportunity to work or partner with, thank you for being the inspiration and foundation for A Chemical Engineer in the Palm Oil Milling Industry.

Foreword

I am glad to be invited by Hong Wai Onn to write a Foreword for his book A Chemical Engineer in the Palm Oil Milling Industry.

This is a story of a manager working in an oil palm mill who has met many people and, together, has faced problems and found ways to solve most of them.

It shows the passion that Hong Wai Onn has for his work, and how he went into details to figure out the right answers. He was also involved in pioneering work in remote areas. He was assisted by his team at all levels, and his can-do attitude has helped him to finish each task.

This is the first book that has come out with stories from the mills. The episodes serve to entertain, while the reader will also get an insight into the people and the work that they do.

Mahbob Abdullah

June 2020

Introduction

Given the long list of challenges facing the world, such as food supply, energy, and the environment, and the limited number of engineers to help out with these challenges, a good question to ask is, where should chemical engineering talent best be used?

One option is the palm oil industry. This is an opportunity for chemical engineers for two main reasons. First, palm oil involves the kind of technologies that chemical engineers have a solid background and history in, such as heat transfer, thermodynamics, mass transfer, and separation processes, to name but a few. Second, palm oil is a large-scale business. It currently employs well over a million people globally.¹ The global palm oil market averaged 33 billion US dollars annually in the 2010s,² and is estimated to reach 60 billion US dollars in 2025.³

But how does the palm oil industry—and the wider edible oils industry—stack up, both in terms of being around long enough for chemical engineers to maintain good careers and having interesting problems to solve?

Starting with edible oils, this is an industry that is likely to be around for a long time, for the obvious reason that people will always need food—one thing that is unlikely to change even with the advancement of technology. This is not the case in other areas that involve engineers as traditional employers, such as the oil and gas industry; many people such as Tesla co-founder Elon Musk are already predicting that electric cars will replace their conventional petrol and diesel counterparts in the decades to come.⁴ If this takes place, the current major consumption and usage of petroleum will abruptly stop and a historically big employer of engineering talent will cease to exist.

If food is predictable in a generally unpredictable world, then why focus on edible oils? First and foremost, because it is obvious that people need edible oils. The human digestive system can convert many food constituents from what we eat to what our bodies need, but there are several oils (such as essential oils) that our digestive system cannot manufacture. So, in order to survive, we need to include these oils in our long-term diet.

Secondly, edible oils have a predictable demand. Even though societies have changed in many ways over the past century, largely attributable to technology (e.g., steam trains replacing horses, and in turn cars replacing steam trains, and then there’s the internet and smartphones), food consumption in general, and edible oil consumption in particular, has barely changed for thousands of years. In other words, whilst the world is becoming an unpredictable place for many industries, this is less so for the edible oils industry.

Thirdly, the edible oils industry needs the process knowledge that engineers, particularly chemical engineers, have plenty of. Most food crops such as potatoes or tomatoes are just harvested and sold to the consumer in their original form but processing oils need pipes, heat exchangers, steam generators, reactors, and separation processes—traditionally, the lot of the chemical engineers.

Last but not least, the edible oils industry is large-scale. The world consumed over 100 million tonnes of edible oil annually in the past decade.⁵ This works out close to 19 kilograms per capita. As the population increases, edible oil consumption, apart from already being large-scale, is expected to grow even more.

If this is the case for edible oils in general, how then does palm oil compare? This is an important question for young engineers because they will want to invest their energy in an industry that will be around for the long-term. In my perspective, palm oil is attractive for three main reasons.

Palm oil has one particular ace: it tops the list of oil crops for yield. Additionally, yield is a simple topic where the numbers are basic, and there is no debate about them. If that is palm oil’s best positive, what is its corresponding negative? The most common one is over issues that involve deforestation, which, in contrast to yield, is a far more complex and debated topic.

Deforestation is often linked to the loss of biodiversity, for which there are many unknowns. For instance, the Wikipedia entry on Global Biodiversity estimates the total species count in the world to be in the range of two million to one trillion, 80 per cent of which are not yet described.⁶ Even if the debate on biodiversity settles down, other complex debates will continue, such as the one on ethics: how do we decide how important one species is over another?

Everyone accepts that it is fine for plant species to be killed so that humans can survive, but there are different views about the importance of other species, for example, killing cows so humans can eat meat. Another unknown is how much biodiversity there is in an oil palm plantation. One thing we do know is that oil palm plantations are filled with insects, particularly the Elaeidobius kamerunicus (flying weevil), which is essential for productive crop pollination. Palm producers desire profit, so they aim for high yields—and that means lots of insects.

Even if these debates ever settle down, going back to the topic of yield, a key point in favour of palm oil will remain: as people are not about to stop consuming edible oils, how much worse would things be with any other oil crop? With this, the discussion returns to a simpler level: if all palm production were to halt, and soybean oil was used as an alternative, then eight times the land area would be needed. This is because soybean yields 448 kilograms of oil per hectare compared with palm, which yields an average of 3,550 kilograms per hectare.⁷ Even swapping cultivation of palm to olive oil, a generally non-controversial, and much-liked industry, the figure would be about four times higher as olive oil yield is only 816 kilograms per hectare.⁸

Apart from the advantage in terms of yield, oil palm leads to relatively less disruption of species’ habitats. Oil palm is a perennial crop, where a typical oil-producing palm tree lives for twenty to thirty years. After that time, it is removed and replaced with a new, younger one. By contrast, most other large-scale edible oil crops, particularly soybean, rapeseed, corn, and sunflower, need to be replanted on an annual basis. This involves intensive and highly mechanised ploughing, planting, and harvesting once every twelve months. This high level of activity means considerable disruption to indigenous species, from mice to snakes, to bats and butterflies.

Lastly, palm oil is a large employer. In Malaysia alone, direct workers number over half a million, with double that figure for number of employees in support industries. Although many of these employees are in low-income rural areas, many of which are labourers, there is also a sizeable number of careers in engineering. As a tax generator for Malaysia, palm oil has remained among the top ten largest export earners in the past decade.⁹

All in all, the above list points to the conclusion that palm oil will be here to stay, and will probably keep on growing at that. The big question is, what are the roles for chemical engineers in the palm oil milling industry, and what can they learn from this industry?

In this book, I will answer this primary question by providing an insider’s experience and perspective of the opportunities the palm oil milling industry can offer a chemical engineer.

The idea behind this book evolved over a period of a few years. When I got involved in the Institution of Chemical Engineers, I often found myself drawing upon my experiences at one of the country’s leading oil palm plantation companies. I learned that many of the experiences and knowledge I gained at Genting Plantations are lessons from which any chemical engineer could benefit from.

Another experience spurring me to write this book came from my speaking experience. As a speaker, I have presented at seminars and conferences all over the country. On one of these occasions, I had the chance to speak at the National Chemical Engineering Symposium. In my keynote speech, I talked about my experiences working with Genting Plantations. It soon became apparent to me that there was tremendous interest in the chemical engineering community in gaining a better understanding of the inner workings of this profession. The seed was planted, but I still had not made the decision to capture my experiences on paper.

I gained the final commitment and motivation to write this book in an interesting way. I had a coffee talk with Mahbob Abdullah, a veteran of the palm oil industry and author of Planter’s Tales and Planter Upriver, after an event at the Majestic Hotel, Malacca. He passed me a book authored by him entitled Now You Too Can Write! and encouraged me to share my experiences with others in the form of writing, just as he did.

The combination of my experiences and the Malacca session finally convinced me that I had an important story to share, and it needed to be put in writing.

You do not have to be a chemical engineer or work in the palm oil milling industry to enjoy this memoir. The insights are just as valuable for any discipline of engineering and for any business, for the sake of inspiration.

1. The Palm Oil Industry

I have been regularly invited by institutions and universities to give talks and lectures. Chemical engineering and palm oil related matters are a few of the most frequent topics touched upon. Whenever I have the chance to speak to undergraduates and young professionals, I am curious to know how many of them are interested in the palm oil industry or have already ventured into it. Surprisingly, only a handful of them raised their hands. Upon questioning them, I have come to realise that most people do not understand this industry, and have no clue as to how they can contribute to it. As such, I would like to share with you the fascinating background of the palm oil industry in this chapter.

Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) originated from West Africa. It grows in regions around the equator, and is a tropical tree with leaves that extend to about five metres long.¹ Currently, most of the oil palm trees grow in Indonesia and Malaysia, followed by Thailand, Colombia, and Nigeria. This expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia is mainly due to the suitable climate, stable political environment, and government policy to encourage palm oil production.

Oil palm is a perennial crop that starts bearing fruits after thirty months of field planting and will continue to be productive for the next twenty to thirty years. Each oil palm tree produces several fruit bunches at a time, with fruit bunches ripening about every ten days. Can you imagine harvesting an oil palm tree today, and then coming back to the same area for another round of harvesting after only ten days? This is how productive oil palm is!

It is interesting to note that oil palm is a monoecious crop; the same tree bears both male and female flowers. Each tree produces compact bunches with ten to thirty hundred fruitlets per fruit bunch. Each fruitlet is oblong or elongated in shape and consists of a single seed or kernel enclosed in a shell, which is surrounded by a fleshy mesocarp. The fruitlet is dark purple, almost black in colour, and turns reddish orange when ripe.

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Oil Palm Comes to Malaysia

The story of how oil palm came to Malaysia can be traced back to a series of events in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oil palm was introduced to Southeast Asia when planted at the Bogor Botanical Garden, Indonesia in 1848. It was introduced to Malaysia, then Malaya, by the British in the early 1870s as an ornamental plant. Soon, the tree became a common sight along major roads, in front of government buildings, and in public parks. The first commercial planting of oil palm in Malaysia was established by a young Frenchman, Henri Fauconnier, in 1917 at the Tennamaram Estate in Bestari Jaya (Batang Berjuntai), Selangor. This first commercial oil palm plantation laid the foundation for the development of Malaysia’s palm oil industry.

Although I was not yet born when the first commercial oil palm was planted, I was privileged to be invited to join a special event organised by the Malaysian Palm Oil Board at Tennamaram Estate on May 18, 2017 to celebrate the centenary of Malaysian palm oil. It was indeed a great pleasure for me to celebrate this occasion in the spirit of pride with fellow Malaysians.

After Malaysia gained independence in 1957, the expansion of agriculture was considered a major priority to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor. The government established Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) to take on this formidable challenge through a policy of providing land for the landless, and jobs for the jobless. Initially, pioneer settlers cultivated rubber trees.

Cultivation of oil palm in Malaysia increased at a fast pace in 1961 under the FELDA Taib Andak scheme, which was introduced to eradicate the poverty of smallholders by planting oil palm, as they provided a faster return on investment as compared to rubber. The pace of land development picked up as each settler received eight acres planted with oil palm; two acres of subsidiary crops, usually fruit trees; and a house on a quarter-acre lot.² Being Malaysian, I am proud of the FELDA programme, which has since been acknowledged by the World Bank as a successful model of poverty alleviation for developing countries.³

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The Palm Oil Industry in Malaysia

The last one hundred years has seen significant achievements in the Malaysian palm oil industry. After