Utilization of felled oil palm trunk: Trunk sections storage on oil palm sap production

Oil palm trunk (OPT) is one of the biomass produce during replanting of palm tree and this is generated every twenty five years in a given plantation. The core of the OPT when mechanically squeezed produce sap, which can be used to produce bio-ethanol. In this study, four OPT was used and each OPT was chopped into four sections which were upper, middle 1, middle 2 and bottom. The sections were stored for 1, 15, 30 and 45 days before being mechanically pretreated to produce palm sap. The mass balance during the production was recorded which resulted in the decrease of the sap volume during trunk storage time from 304.98L to 85.74L.