Case Study: Global Palm Oil Company reduces acetone and energy costs with CoolPlanet

Optimising the acetone washing process saves €125k in energy for palm oil plant

The Global Palm Oil Company was facing high production costs in its palm oil fractionation process due to excessive acetone solvent wastage. This inefficiency at the belt filters created a higher demand for steam during the subsequent distillation process. CoolPlanet was engaged to address this challenge using its bespoke software engineering platform, CoolPlanetOS.

CoolPlanet’s solution involved using its platform to model and implement a counter-current acetone wash flow, reducing acetone usage by over 70%. The team also redesigned the distillation heat exchange process to recover waste heat. This optimised the entire system, leading to total energy savings of €125,943 and a project payback of under 0.8 years for the customer.