The palm oil industry of South-East Asia generates very large volumes of oil palm empty fruit bunch (EFB), a fibrous lignocellulosic residue that remains after the oil-bearing fruitlets are stripped from the fresh fruit bunch. EFB is most often discarded in the plantation, where it decomposes and represents both an environmental liability and an unexploited resource. The recovery, conversion or valorisation of EFB - whether as solid fuel, as a substrate for anaerobic digestion, or as a feedstock for sugar and bio-product recovery - depends first on knowing its basic physical and chemical properties. This article, the first of a series, reports a field measurement of the two properties most relevant to any handling or conversion decision: dry solids (DS) and moisture content. A 1 kg sample of fresh EFB collected at a working mill in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, was oven-dried at 105 C. The dry solids content was 56.08 % and the moisture content 43.92 %, with a propagated measurement uncertainty of approximately +/- 0.01 % (k = 2) arising from balance readability. We argue that the dominant real-world uncertainty in any single EFB property is not instrumental but biological - feedstock heterogeneity and sampling - and we frame our result accordingly. The measured value is then compared with the literature, and a summary of EFB biochemical composition, proximate analysis, ultimate analysis, calorific value and inorganic (ash) chemistry is compiled from published sources to provide a reference baseline for the remainder of the series.
spagnuolo et al. (Tue,) studied this question.