Enhancing Thailand’s Palm Oil Sustainability

Helping Thailand’s leading crude palm oil producer stay on track in achieving and maintaining alignment with the market’s ambitious sustainability goals.

Palm oil is the most widely consumed vegetable oil. Ice cream, toothpaste, shampoo, detergent, and biodiesel are just some of the consumer products that make use of the oil. The Univanich Oil Palm Research Centre in southern Thailand is internationally recognized for its advanced breeding program supplying high-yielding seeds and seedlings for local farmers and exporting to sustainable oil palm growers around the world.

The company’s five factories in Thailand produce over 230,000 tons of crude palm oil annually. All by-products are either used within its plantations as a source of organic fertilizer or sold to third-party buyers for energy conversion.

Challenge

Four of its factories have Biogas reactors that break down the wastewater through anaerobic bacteria to produce methane that is captured and used to generate electricity from gas generator engines.

Previously, the company’s plant had five units of 1.0 MW gas generator sets installed since 2011. After more than 10 years of operations, they faced some issues with after-market support and product discontinuation. This impacted the operation’s supply chain.

Approach

After a thorough analysis of Univanich’s requirements, we sourced and supplied one unit of Cummins C1200N5C low BTU gas (biogas) generator set. Cummins has long been a leader in providing natural gas engines as one of its sustainable, affordable, and readily available power options. Its generator sets are proven for reliable operation with a wide range of gaseous fuels including natural gas, biogas, coal gas, propane, and other alternative fuels.

In addition, we also assured the customer of having parts availability and a reliable inventory plan in place. The system can provide substantial total cost of ownership savings over an operational lifetime of over 80,000 hours.

Result

Following the delivery and successful commissioning of the first unit of the generator set in April 2023, the company decided to purchase a second unit for its plants.

Along with the improved production capabilities, Univanich is also getting better aftermarket support from Cummins to keep the equipment running and performing at optimal levels. More importantly, both local and international sustainable oil palm growers are benefiting from the company’s sustainable and environment-conscious operations.

Beyond the better savings ahead from our more sustainable operations, we are also relieved to know that we will have parts readily available and a dependable inventory plan in place.

Univanich Oil Palm Research Centre