Benchmarking energy challenges in palm oil mills in Ghana

The current energy crisis in Ghana has affected significant number of industries which have direct impact on the country's economy. Amongst the affected industries are palm oil production industries even though the impact is less as compared to fully relied national grid industries. Most of the large and medium palm oil production industries are partially grid reliance, however, the unavailability and the high cost palm biomass poses huge challenge. This paper aimed to identify and analyse the energy challenges associated with the palm oil production industries in Ghana. The study was conducted on thirteen largest palm oil production plants in Ghana. Data was obtained by the use of questionnaire and observation. Since the study aimed to compare the respective energy challenges associated with the thirteen largest palm oil mills under study and establish a benchmark that represents a common problem of all the thirteen mills under study, the study uses cross-tabulation analysis and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) as the statistical tools to validate the benchmark. The results indicate that, lack of sustainability of palm biomass supply chain is the key energy challenge in the palm oil production industries in Ghana. Other problems include intermittent power supply from the grid but limited to the medium scale mills. A baseline was set by comparing the boiler capacity and the palm biomass produced by the large scale mills and determined the sustaining period of the biomass produced when considered as boiler fuel. The average value obtained from all the large scale mills is considered as the proposed energy challenge benchmark. The one-way ANOVA test revealed that there is statistically significant difference amongst the boiler capacity, FFB processing capacity, quantity of biomass produced and the average sustaining period. The Post-Hoc Scheffe test then revealed that there is statistically significant difference between the boiler capacity and the biomass produced. The results also revealed that there are statistically significant differences between the boiler capacity and the average sustaining period. There were no other significant differences between the other parameter groups.