Crude palm oil Indonesia is a 51.66 million tonne industry, and most of what decides its value happens after the fruit is pressed. Free fatty acids rise with every hour a bunch waits and every day the oil sits in a warm tank; bleachability falls with heat and time; tonnes go missing between the shore tank and the ship’s gauge. A refinery or export terminal is designed around those three facts, whether or not the designer says so.
This guide follows the oil from the mill to the vessel, especialy the crude palm oil Indonesia: the quality parameters Indonesian and international buyers test, what heated storage must do to protect them, where losses occur in transfer and loading, and what the Sumatran terminals that ship the oil look like today. We develop an estate planned around plantation processing and a liquid bulk port in North Sumatra, so the last section is about our own plan, with its status stated plainly.
Last updated: 08 October 2026
Crude Palm Oil Indonesia by the Numbers
Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of crude palm oil, and the 2025 figures from the producers’ association GAPKI set the scale of everything downstream.
| Measure (2025) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Crude palm oil production | 51.66 million tonnes, up 7.26% |
| CPO and palm kernel oil combined | 56.55 million tonnes |
| Exports of palm products | 32.34 million tonnes, worth US$35.87 billion |
| Domestic consumption | 24.77 million tonnes, of which biodiesel 12.70 million |
The export side carries two government charges that change monthly with the reference price. For October 2026 the Trade Ministry set the CPO reference price at US$1,042.15 a tonne, which puts the export duty at US$178 a tonne and the export levy at US$130.27, or 12.5% of the reference price, according to the Trade Ministry’s October announcement. Together they take roughly US$308 off every exported tonne before freight, which is why the margin left for a processor depends so heavily on what happens between the mill and the ship. How the Ministry of Trade builds that reference price each month, and what moves it, is set out in our guide to the palm oil Indonesia price.
Most of that oil leaves Sumatra through a few public liquid bulk berths at Dumai, Belawan and Teluk Bayur; our map of Indonesia’s bulk terminals gives their capacities and vessel limits.
What Good CPO Means: FFA, Moisture and DOBI
Buyers price crude palm oil on three numbers, and each one is a record of how the oil was handled.
| Parameter | SNI 01-2901-2006 limit | Typical refinery contract | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free fatty acid (as palmitic) | 5% max | 3.5% or lower; some export markets 2% | How long and how roughly the fruit and oil were handled |
| Moisture | 0.25% max | 0.15 to 0.20% | Whether hydrolysis will keep raising FFA in storage |
| Impurities | 0.25% max | 0.02 to 0.05% | Mill clarification and tank cleanliness |
| DOBI (bleachability) | Not set by the standard | 2.5 to 3.0 minimum | Oxidation and overheating history |
The Indonesian standard’s limits, as set out in a 2021 study of CPO quality, are 5% free fatty acid, 0.25% water and 0.25% impurities. Refiners buy tighter than the standard because every point of FFA is oil they neutralise and lose, and every point of moisture is FFA that will form while the cargo waits.
DOBI, the Deterioration of Bleachability Index, is the ratio of light absorbed at 446 nm to that absorbed at 269 nm. It measures carotene against oxidation products, so it falls when oil is overheated, overripe or old. Industry test guides class oil below 2.3 as poor, 2.3 to 2.9 as fair, 2.9 to 3.2 as good and above 3.2 as excellent. A low-DOBI cargo costs the refiner more bleaching earth and more colour, and it is the parameter most sensitive to what a terminal does with its heating coils.
If you are planning refining or oleochemical capacity and want the specification of the port we are designing beside it, request the Sumalacca port specifications and our team will send what is published, with the status of each item.
From Bunch to Mill Tank: Where Quality Is Won or Lost
Free fatty acid is made in the fruit, not in the tank, and the clock starts at harvest. Bruising and the enzymes released by it begin breaking triglycerides into free acids as soon as the bunch is cut, and the reaction only stops when the mill’s steriliser cooks the fruit. The large plantation groups run their logistics on that fact: SMART, for one, targets delivery from plantation to mill within 24 hours, because the faster the fruit is crushed, the less FFA forms and the better both yield and quality.
What the mill produces is then at its best, and from that point the oil can only be protected, not improved. An Indonesian study published in 2021 by Syafrianti, Lubis and Elisabeth followed CPO held in a mill tank at 45°C and found FFA rising by roughly 0.35 to 0.41 percentage points a day, with DOBI collapsing from above 3.5 to below 0.5 within twenty days. Their recommendations are blunt: pump the oil out within four hours and hold it for less than eight days.
Those two numbers, a day of delay in the field and a week in the tank, explain why the distance between a mill, a refinery and a berth is a quality variable and not only a freight cost. Our guide to the palm oil supply chain follows the chain from plantation to export terminal stage by stage.
Heated Storage: What the Tank Has to Do
Crude palm oil is semi-solid at room temperature, so it has to be heated to move and cooled to survive. The Codex code of practice for the bulk storage and transport of edible oils, reissued in 2015 and carried by FOSFA, sets the design rules a tank farm is measured against.
- Materials. Stainless steel is preferred. Mild steel tanks should be coated internally with an inert material such as phenolic epoxy. Copper and its alloys, which catalyse oxidation, must not touch the oil anywhere in the system.
- Heating. Hot water at about 80°C circulated through coils is the best method, because it is least likely to overheat the oil locally. Steam is permitted up to 150 kPa gauge, about 127°C. For melting, a coil area of about 0.1 m² per tonne of tank capacity is recommended, and heating should never exceed 5°C in 24 hours.
- Atmosphere. Tanks used for high-quality products or long storage should have facilities for sparging and blanketing with inert gas.
- Cleanliness. Tanks must be clean and dry before use, and where several products share a pipeline the line must be cleared completely between grades, preferably by inert gas or pigging rather than by water.
The temperatures themselves come from the PORAM instructions that the trade writes into contracts and FOSFA publishes: crude palm oil at 32 to 40°C during storage and voyage, raised to 50 to 55°C only for loading and discharge. Refined palm olein is held cooler, at 25 to 30°C and 32 to 35°C respectively, and stearin hotter.
The tension in every tank farm sits between those two ranges. Oil kept warm enough to pump fast is losing DOBI and gaining FFA; oil kept cool enough to protect quality takes longer to load. A terminal that heats only before a movement, measures temperature at top, middle and bottom as Codex requires, and keeps its coil surfaces gentle is doing the job. One that runs hot to keep the schedule is charging its customers in bleaching earth.
Transfer and Vessel Loading: Where the Tonnes Go
The quality parameters above are lost gradually. Tonnes are lost at specific points, and almost all of them are measurement points.
At Belawan, crude palm oil no longer reaches the ship by truck; it is stored in shore tanks and pumped through pipelines straight into the vessel. That is the efficient design, and it concentrates the risk in two numbers: the shore figure, gauged in the tank before and after the transfer, and the ship figure, gauged in the vessel’s cargo tanks. The difference between them is what the trade calls a loss, and most of it is not oil that went anywhere.
Maritime Mutual’s risk bulletin on CPO losses separates the two kinds. Physical losses are theft and leakage, prevented by numbered seals on every valve and access and by checking the spaces around cargo tanks. Paper losses are gauging errors: sounding tapes that do not reach a tank bottom coated with solidified oil, trim and list corrections not applied, and temperature readings taken where the cargo has partly set, which throws the volume-to-weight conversion. The bulletin’s cure is electronic thermocouple thermometers, ullage rather than sounding measurement, and heating coils on barges. The trade protects itself with a Customary Trade Allowance, typically 0.5% of the cargo and ranging from 0.3% to 1.0%, inside which a carrier faces no claim.
Three things follow for a processor. Every extra transfer, from mill tank to truck to shore tank to ship, adds a measurement point and a residue, so fewer transfers mean fewer apparent losses. Custody transfer metering at the jetty turns an argument about gauges into a number.
And a vessel’s previous cargoes matter: Codex requires oil to travel only in tanks whose last cargo is on its acceptable list, and the shipper, not the terminal, carries the consequence if it was not. Our guide to bulk terminal operations explains the liquid bulk handling chain from manifold to tank farm in more detail. The freight side of the same trip is worked through in our guide to logistics cost in Indonesia.
The Sumatran Terminals and What SIIPE Is Planning
The three gateways that ship most Sumatran palm oil are shared public berths. Belawan’s liquid bulk terminal is rated at 6 million tonnes a year and already handles 3.5 to 4 million; Dumai exported 4.28 million tonnes of CPO in 2023; Teluk Bayur shipped 3.1 million tonnes of palm products in 2025. At each, the berth is shared by every tank-farm operator behind it, so a refinery in the Medan industrial belt reaches the ship through tanks and pipelines it does not control. Certified, segregated oil, covered in our guide to sustainable palm oil in Indonesia, makes that sharing harder still.
SIIPE (Sumalacca Integrated Industrial and Port Estate) is a planned 5,600-hectare integrated industrial estate, deep seaport and township in Medan Belawan, North Sumatra, 4.7 km from Belawan Port. Around 840 hectares is acquired and the remaining 4,760 hectares still has to be acquired or reclaimed. The current development phase covers 3,000 hectares: 1,800 ha industrial estate, 400 ha deep seaport and 800 ha residential township.
Crude palm oil and plantation processing is the first of the five sectors the estate is planned around. The masterplan places plantation processing and refining plots under 5 km from the Sumalacca Dry & Liquid Bulk Port, with customs and quarantine services planned on site.
The port is planned, not operational, and is a medium-term objective on our roadmap; its published design is a basin of -8 to -10 m LWS with a 13 nautical mile approach channel, which suits Handysize and smaller Supramax tankers. A chemical storage tank facility and a jetty are on the estate’s planned infrastructure list, and capacities and operational status are not stated in the plan, so we quote no tank volume, loading rate or berth count.
What the plan does address is the chain this guide has followed. A refinery whose shore tank is minutes from its own berth makes one transfer where an inland plant makes three: fewer days of FFA rise, fewer measurement points, and a tank farm whose heating and segregation can still be specified by the tenants who will use it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much crude palm oil does Indonesia produce?
Indonesia produced 51.66 million tonnes of crude palm oil in 2025, up 7.26%, and 56.55 million tonnes including palm kernel oil, according to GAPKI. Exports of palm products reached 32.34 million tonnes worth US$35.87 billion, while domestic consumption was 24.77 million tonnes, 12.70 million of it for biodiesel.
What is the quality standard for crude palm oil Indonesia?
SNI 01-2901-2006 limits free fatty acid to 5% as palmitic acid, moisture to 0.25% and impurities to 0.25%. The standard sets no DOBI minimum, but refineries typically require 2.5 to 3.0 and buy FFA at 3.5% or lower, with some export markets specifying 2%.
At what temperature is crude palm oil stored and loaded?
PORAM heating instructions published by FOSFA specify 32 to 40°C for crude palm oil during storage and the voyage, raised to 50 to 55°C only for loading and discharge. Codex practice limits heating to 5°C in 24 hours, using hot water coils at about 80°C, and prohibits copper in contact with the oil.
Why does free fatty acid rise during storage?
Moisture and enzymes hydrolyse the oil’s triglycerides into free acids, and heat accelerates it. In one Indonesian study, CPO held at 45°C gained roughly 0.35 to 0.41 percentage points of FFA a day, with DOBI collapsing within three weeks, which is why the authors advise storing crude oil for less than eight days.
How much crude palm oil is lost in shipment?
Contracts usually allow a Customary Trade Allowance of around 0.5% of the cargo, within a range of 0.3% to 1.0%. Much of a recorded shortfall is a paper loss from gauging and temperature errors rather than missing oil, so terminals use custody transfer meters, ullage measurement and electronic thermometers to reduce it.
Crude Palm Oil Indonesia: Request Sumalacca Port Specifications
If your plant’s economics turn on the distance from tank to berth, the specification that matters is the one for the port you would actually use. SIIPE is a planned 5,600-hectare estate in Medan Belawan with a current 3,000-hectare development phase, around 840 hectares acquired, and a site 4.7 km from Belawan Port. The Sumalacca Dry & Liquid Bulk Port is planned rather than operational, and we will say so in every document we send.
Ask our team for the published port design, the status of the reclamation and port licences, and the plantation processing plots nearest the planned berth. Request port specifications through the contact page, selecting Port Area as your interest, or message us on WhatsApp at +62 811 860 980.
