Home Operation of the plant
A pomace oil plant receives the pomace in bulk quantities, usually tens of tones, from various olive mills, which are factories using friction and pressure to partially remove the oil from the olives.
Plant Internal Process
Pomace is a mixture of pomace oil (~5%), water (~50%) and pomace wood (~45%).
There are two stages in the production process: the drying process and the oil extraction process.
In the drying process, the pomace is being fed into rotating cylinders, which are heated. There, the large content of water evaporates and is removed by fans in the form of wet steam. The removal of the water is of primal importance, since the oil cannot be extracted with water present.
Our factories use a total of eight such cylinders, able to dry more than 1.500 tons of pomace per 24 hours.
The oil extraction process is an extremely difficult procedure, common to most seed oils, requiring skill and attention. It uses pure hexane (C6H14) as dilutant, in order to “wash” the oil out of the pomace. The extraction is achieved since the oil is removed together with the flow of hexane. Then, the mixture of pomace oil and hexane is heated. The liquid hexane, having a boiling temperature bellow 60oC, evaporates and the pomace oil remains pure.
What is left of the pomace after the oil extraction is called pomace wood. Pomace wood is a form of fossil fuel having about one third of the calorific value of petrol.
