What is POME and Why Does It Need to Be Treated?

If you work at or near a palm oil mill in Malaysia, you have likely heard the term POME thrown around in conversations about compliance, wastewater, and increasingly, biogas. But what exactly is it, and why has it become such a central topic for mill operators over the past decade?

What is POME?

POME stands for Palm Oil Mill Effluent. It is the wastewater byproduct generated during the milling process when fresh fruit bunches are processed into crude palm oil. For every tonne of fresh fruit bunches processed, a mill typically produces around 0.6 to 0.7 tonnes of POME.

This effluent is thick, acidic, and extremely high in organic content. It contains a mix of water, oil residues, and suspended solids left over from sterilisation, clarification, and other stages of milling. Left untreated, it is one of the most polluting types of agricultural wastewater in the world.

Why POME Cannot Simply Be Discharged

POME has an extremely high Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) — often hundreds of times higher than domestic sewage. If discharged directly into rivers or waterways without treatment, it depletes oxygen levels in the water, killing fish and aquatic life, and can contaminate water sources used by nearby communities.

This is why the Department of Environment (DOE) Malaysia enforces strict discharge standards for palm oil mills. Every mill is legally required to treat its effluent before release, typically through a combination of anaerobic digestion, ponding systems, or more advanced treatment technologies.

The Hidden Opportunity: Biogas

Here is where POME becomes interesting rather than purely a compliance burden. As POME breaks down anaerobically (without oxygen), it naturally produces biogas — a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 25 times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year period, which means untreated POME ponds are a significant contributor to a mill's carbon footprint.

However, that same methane can be captured and put to productive use. Many Malaysian mills have installed biogas capture systems over their effluent treatment ponds or digester tanks, channeling the gas produced into:

• Combustion via burners to generate steam or heat for mill operations
• Power generation through gas engines connected to the grid
• Safe flaring, where capture for energy use is not yet feasible, to convert methane into less harmful CO2 before release

This shift — from treating POME purely as a waste problem to treating it as an energy resource — has become a defining trend in the Malaysian palm oil industry over the last fifteen years, driven both by environmental regulation and by the Renewable Energy incentives available to mills that generate power from biogas.

What This Means for Mill Operators

If your mill is still relying solely on open ponding systems without any biogas capture or flaring, you may be facing a growing compliance risk. DOE Malaysia has progressively tightened requirements around methane emissions from POME treatment facilities, and open ponds without proper gas management are increasingly falling short of expectations.

Retrofitting existing treatment systems with a biogas capture and combustion setup — whether a burner, a flare stack, or both — is often more achievable than mills expect, and can be phased in without disrupting ongoing operations.

How THAGO Can Help

THAGO has designed, fabricated, and commissioned over 100 biogas burner and flare stack systems for palm oil mills across Malaysia and internationally, including for major groups such as IOI, Sime Darby, KLK, FELDA, and Wilmar. We handle the full project lifecycle — from initial site assessment through to installation and commissioning — so mills can move from a compliance risk to a properly managed, revenue-generating system.