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Spain’s Grupo GEA and the National Agri­cul­tural Devel­op­ment Com­pany (NADEC), the largest eco­log­i­cal olive oil pro­ducer in Saudi Ara­bia and the Mid­dle East, have signed an agree­ment to build Asia’s largest olive mill.

The mill will be located in the province of Al-Jouf, which is sit­u­ated in the north of the coun­try and is in close prox­im­ity to where NADEC is in the process of plant­ing five mil­lion olive trees on 7,400 acres.

The major­ity of the olive trees planted will be Picual, in what is expected to be the world’s largest olive orchard, which fea­tures super inten­sive cul­ti­va­tion with mod­ern drip irri­ga­tion sys­tems.

The state-of-the art oil mill, which is expected to be oper­a­tional in six months, is a turnkey project with a cost that exceeds €3 mil­lion ($3.41 mil­lion).

The project rep­re­sents a new stage in the rela­tion­ship between NADEC and GEA, which in 2016 com­pleted the first phase of this project. With the sec­ond phase, GEA will deliver an olive oil mill offer­ing an inte­grated solu­tion that encom­passes civil and automa­tion engi­neer­ing, pro­cess­ing, train­ing and the required indus­trial equip­ment.

The pro­cess­ing lines have been built to respond to dif­fer­ent require­ments, depend­ing on national tra­di­tions and the size of the har­vest. These fac­tors will dic­tate which kind of pro­duc­tion meth­ods are cho­sen.

GEA sup­plies com­plete pro­cess­ing lines from tak­ing in and clean­ing of the olives to milling, malax­ing (con­tin­u­ous or batch,) sep­a­ra­tion and decant­ing. Once oil is obtained the pro­cess­ing lines can also han­dle treat­ing pomace as well as water. The tai­lor-made sys­tems have also been designed in order to obtain the max­i­mum pos­si­ble yield and qual­ity, while min­i­miz­ing water con­sump­tion.

The mill will be built in Úbeda, Andalu­sia, and then trans­ported to Saudi Ara­bia. GEA’s project will bring together the exper­tise of sev­eral machin­ery man­u­fac­tur­ers from Spain to craft the inte­grated solu­tion that sets apart this turnkey project from other mills in the region.

Saudi Ara­bia began to plant olive trees back in 2007 in Al-Jouf in order to sup­ply its domes­tic con­sump­tion. Accord­ing to olive expert, Juan Vilar, by 2018 Saudi Ara­bia had planted nearly 52,000 acres of olive groves.

Desert areas divide olive groves, located north and south of Saudi Ara­bia, where olive trees are han­dled with great respect because of their spir­i­tual value in Islam. Most of Saudi Ara­bia has a desert cli­mate with extremely low rain­fall and extreme tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ences between day and night.

Al-Jouf is con­sid­ered the kingdom’s olive resort, with a rich cul­tural her­itage and diverse nat­ural envi­ron­ment which makes it one of Saudi Arabia’s top tourist des­ti­na­tions.

Saudi Ara­bia is home to three of the world’s largest mod­ern olive groves in terms of den­sity, dimen­sion and cul­ti­va­tion tech­niques. Cul­ti­va­tion in the coun­try is com­pletely mech­a­nized. Almost 80 per­cent of the Kingdom’s olive cul­ti­va­tion is geared toward olive oil pro­duc­tion and the remain­ing 20 per­cent to table olives.

The con­struc­tion of this olive mill is a new stage in a work­ing rela­tion­ship between Spain and Saudi Ara­bia toward the con­sol­i­da­tion of the latter’s olive and olive oil indus­tries. Al-Jouf’s Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Jaén are col­lab­o­rat­ing in research top­ics related to the olive sec­tor to improve pro­duc­tion capac­ity.

A total of 21 research projects are planned as part of this agree­ment respon­si­ble for the cre­ation of an Advanced Cen­ter for Olive and Olive Oil Stud­ies, and the trans­fer of tech­nol­ogy and tech­ni­cal knowl­edge.

• Canal Sur


• EFE