Evaluating the Sustainability and Inherent Safety of a Crude Palm Oil Production Process in North-Colombia

Abstract

The African palm is the main source of vegetable oil worldwide, representing about 29.60% of the total oil and fat production around the world. The rapid expansion of this sector has faced several concerns related to environmental and social aspects that have driven the search for sustainable alternatives. In this work, the inherent safety analysis and sustainability evaluation for the crude palm oil production process was performed using the inherent safety index (ISI) method and the sustainable weighted return on investment metric (SWROIM), respectively. The process was designed for a processing capacity of 30 t/h of palm bunches and under North-Colombian conditions. Three technical indicators were considered to evaluate the process sustainability including exergy efficiency, potential environmental impacts output (PEI output), and the total inherent safety index (ITI). The economic factor is directly considered since the SWROIM is an extension of the conventional return on investment (ROI). The resulting ITI at 11 indicated an inherently safe process, and the highest risk was observed for the process equipment safety subindex. The SWROIM reached a higher value (53%) compared to the conventional ROI (49.39%), which suggests positive impacts on sustainability. The novelty of this work lies in detecting the inherent risks and providing a decision making criteria for this project through a complete evaluation that relates economic, energy, environmental, and safety criteria.

Inherent Safety Analysis and Sustainability Evaluation of a Vaccine Production Topology in North-East Colombia

“…Global exergy efficiency is an essential indicator in this analysis and was used by the authors as a parameter for calculating the SWROIM. Exergy can be defined as the maximum amount of work that may be performed by a system when it is brought into equilibrium with a reference environment [22]. It can be estimated through Equation ( 5), where Ex total−entry is the exergy associated with the inlet mass flow and utilities; on the other hand, Ex destroyed is the difference between exergy inlet and exergy of product.…”

Inherent safety analysis and sustainability evaluation of dual crude palm and kernel oil production in North Colombia

“…Nevertheless, the largest oil palm crop is located within nine departments of the North region (Castiblanco et al, 2015). African palm plantations in Colombia are destined for palm oil production (González-Delgado et al, 2021), from which rachis, palm cake, sludge, and wastewater are obtained as waste (Nahrul et al, 2020). Palm oil is the largest commercialized vegetable oil in the world, representing about 29.60% of the global oil and fat production (Rivera-Méndez et al, 2017).…”