POME, SBEO and SSAO brokerage

Raw POME oil rarely goes straight into a hydrotreater. It is pretreated first, and understanding that sequence explains most of the products you will be offered under the POME name.

• Degumming. Acid treatment, normally with phosphoric acid, conditions the phospholipids so they can be separated and at the same time precipitates metal contaminants.
• Bleaching. Bleaching earth adsorbs the conditioned gums, residual soaps, colour bodies and remaining trace metals. Filtration then removes the spent earth along with everything it has picked up. That spent earth still holds oil, which is where SBEO comes from: see below.
• Deacidification. Steam stripping in a packed column under vacuum takes the free fatty acids down to what the downstream process needs. Because POME oil starts high in FFA, this step carries a heavy load and a correspondingly large distillate stream.
• That distillate is POME-FAD, the fatty acid distillate from POME pretreatment. It sits in the same specification family as PFAD and trades much like it. Anyone treating POME-FAD as a waste problem rather than a product is leaving money on the table.

So when someone offers you *pretreated POME* or *refined POME*, ask which steps were actually done and what the resulting phosphorus, metals and FFA figures are. Those three words cover everything from a single settling step to a full degum, bleach and strip, and the price difference between them is the whole trade. The parameters that matter downstream are set out under HVO.

Bleaching earth leaves a refinery holding a significant amount of oil. Recovering it turns a disposal cost into a feedstock, which is the entire commercial logic of SBEO.

• Solvent extraction is the normal route. The spent earth is agitated with a solvent, commonly n-hexane, at moderate temperature, typically in the region of 35 to 50 degrees Celsius, for a matter of tens of minutes. Solids and liquid are then separated and the solvent is recovered from the oil.
• Solvent choice changes the product. More polar solvents extract more, but they also pull across more free fatty acid, so a higher yield can mean a lower grade. That trade-off is a real commercial decision at the plant, not a detail.
• Other routes exist, including supercritical fluid extraction, membrane processes and subcritical water, which give better yields at lower temperature but at a capital cost most operators do not carry.
• FFA in SBEO varies enormously, from low single figures on freshly processed earth to much higher on material that has sat. The earth itself keeps working on the oil, so age matters more here than for most feedstocks. Ask when the earth was generated, not just when the oil was extracted.

SSAO is soapstock acid oil. It comes from the soapstock stream in vegetable oil refining, not from bleaching earth, and the two get confused constantly. Quoting one when you mean the other is a quick way to lose a buyer's confidence before you have started.

Soapstock is what caustic refining produces when free fatty acids are neutralised: a heavy soapy phase separated from the oil. On its own it is difficult to move. Splitting it turns it into something tradeable.

• Acidulation, also called soapstock splitting. A mineral acid, normally sulphuric, is added to bring the pH down to around 1.5, breaking the soaps back into free fatty acids and oil. Plants typically dose 10 to 15 percent above the theoretical requirement, calculated from the FFA content.
• Heat and time. The mixture is heated with steam, commonly to about 85 to 88 degrees, and held for a couple of hours with mixing.
• Separation. The aqueous phase is heavier, so the acid oil separates above it by gravity or with a centrifuge.
• What comes out. A dark mixture of free fatty acids and glycerides, carrying traces of mineral acid, phospholipids and sterols. You will also hear it called acidulated soapstock, acid oil or olein depending on who is selling it.
• Typical FFA runs high, commonly in the region of 50 to 70 percent for the material we see, and acid oils from some streams go higher still. The naturally low cloud point is what makes it interesting for winter grade production.

Residual mineral acid and sulphur are the parameters that decide whether a parcel is welcome downstream, and they are the ones most often absent from an offer. A refined or further treated SSAO is a different and better product again, so be precise about which one you are selling. See esterified acid oils for what happens when that FFA is converted rather than removed.

POME and its derivatives appear in Annex IX of the Renewable Energy Directive, and the exact letter under which a given stream falls has been the subject of genuine and continuing debate. It matters enormously, because Part A and Part B carry different targets, different caps and different national treatment.

Two practical warnings for anyone contracting POME into Europe. First, implementation is national. Member states transpose RED III themselves, and they have taken visibly different positions on multipliers, on caps and on which residues qualify. A cargo that works commercially in one market can be worth substantially less in the country next door.

Second, national policy on POME has been actively changing, including restrictions being introduced in some markets on how POME-derived fuel can be counted towards obligations in coming years. Anyone signing a multi-year POME contract should verify the position in the specific destination market for the specific delivery years, in writing, rather than relying on how it worked last season.

We will tell you what we understand the position to be and where we are not certain. On this product in particular, a broker who sounds completely confident about every member state is a broker to be careful with.

Movement into Europe is normally by parcel tanker or ISO tank, with heated storage depending on the material. Pretreatment capacity at the receiving end is a real constraint, and it narrows the buyer list more than the specification does, a producer without pretreatment simply cannot take the cargo at any price.

We act for mills, refiners and aggregators placing volume into Europe, and for European producers looking for certified supply they can actually run.

Our first questions are about certification scope, traceability to the mill, and which destination market the cargo is aimed at, because if the classification does not work in that market, the specification does not matter. That order of questioning saves everyone a great deal of time.