Lankan oil processing plant starts operations

AEN Palm Oil Processing (Pvt) Ltd recently began operations of its palm oil manufacturing plant in Baduraliya.

AEN Palm Oil Processing (Pvt) Ltd. is a joint venture between three plantation companies in Sri Lanka - Agalawatte Plantations, Elpitiya Plantations and the Richard Pieris-managed Namunukula Plantations. In a bid to diversify Sri Lanka’s three main agricultural export crops, Asian Development Bank has initiated oil palm cultivation in Sri Lanka and the AEN operation has been set up under this scheme with the assistance of the ADB, a joint press release from the companies said.

Oil Palm, a plant that is native to Africa is presently grown heavily in Indonesia and Malaysia for commercial reasons where they extract the oil for export purposes. At present the three companies under AEN Palm Oil Processing (Pvt) Ltd have successfully cultivated more than 3000 hectares of oil palm in the south-western region of the country.

AEN Palm Oil Processing (Pvt) Ltd. exports the total processed capacity to India in crude palm oil (CPO) form and further processing of the oil is done by the overseas customer. “Due to the extraordinary success of the CPO export operation AEN has decided to expand the business in the future by introducing palm kernel processing unit to extract kernel oil and waste matter processing unit to extract non fossil fuel for export as these products have a high demand in Europe and USA,” the statement added.