Lebanese artificial coal made of olive residues
An olive gives up its oil and then, in the hill villages of the Levant, gives again: the dry cake of skins, pulp and crushed stones left after pressing is packed into briquettes and burned through the winter. Nothing in the fruit is thrown away.
Walk behind any traditional olive mill in late autumn and you meet a mountain of damp, khaki-brown paste. This is pomace — in Arabic jift, in French grignons — the crushed remains of skin, flesh and stone once the oil and vegetation water have been squeezed out. A mill turning olives into oil produces far more pomace than oil by weight, and for thousands of years Mediterranean growers have refused to treat it as rubbish. Dried and compressed, it becomes fuel; spread on fields it becomes fertiliser; sent to a solvent plant it yields the cheapest grade of oil on the shelf.
From press cake to briquette
The method is disarmingly simple and needs no chemistry. Fresh pomace is spread in the sun until much of its moisture is gone, then forced through a press or an extruder that compacts it into logs or cylinders. What holds the shape together is not glue but the fruit’s own residual oil and lignin, welded by pressure alone. Once fully dry the briquettes light easily, burn hot and slow, and leave little ash. In villages across Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and North Africa this has long been the poor household’s charcoal — a free by-product turned into a season’s warmth.
Why crushed stones matter
The single most valuable thing in that cake is the pulverised olive pit. Olive-stone fragments are dense, low in moisture and high in energy — closer to a hardwood charcoal than to soft plant waste — which is exactly why a modern industry now sifts them out and sells cleaned olive pit as a premium biomass pellet for stoves and boilers. The villager pressing a mixed briquette by hand and the factory bagging graded pit kernels are chasing the same buried heat. It is one of the quiet efficiencies of the olive that the hardest, most annoying part of the fruit turns out to be the best firewood.
The same cake, a very different oil
There is a twist worth knowing as a buyer. That same pomace, before it is ever dried for the fire, can be shipped to a refinery where hexane solvent strips out the last traces of oil. Refined, deodorised and usually cut with a little virgin oil for flavour, this is sold as olive-pomace oil — legally olive oil, but the bottom of the ladder, a world away from extra virgin. If you have wondered why one bottle costs a fraction of another, this is part of the answer. It is the same principle as the fuel: the mill wastes nothing, and the last squeeze of value is taken from the cake either as cheap oil or as cheap heat.
| Also called | Pomace, grignons, jift, orujo |
|---|---|
| Made of | Olive skin, pulp, crushed stones after pressing |
| Binder | None — held by pressure and residual oil |
| Preparation | Sun-dried, then pressed into logs or cylinders |
| Uses | Winter heating fuel, biomass pellets, fertiliser, pomace oil |
| Best part | Crushed stone fragments — dense, high-energy |
Practical notes
- Fuel pomace must be properly dried — a damp briquette smoulders, smokes and gives little heat.
- Olive-pit pellets sold for stoves are the graded, cleaned version of the same idea and burn very cleanly.
- Do not confuse the fuel with the food: olive-pomace oil is the refined oil made from the same cake, not an extra virgin.
- Spent pomace is also composted; raw, it is too acidic and salty to spread heavily without care.
Olive-residue fuel: common questions
What is olive pomace?
The solid cake of skin, pulp and crushed stones left in the mill after the oil and vegetation water have been pressed out of the olives.
How is it turned into fuel?
It is dried in the sun to drive off moisture, then compressed into logs or cylinders. The fruit’s own residual oil and lignin bind it — no glue is added.
Why are the crushed stones important?
Olive-stone fragments are dense and energy-rich, closer to hardwood charcoal than to soft plant waste. Cleaned and graded, they are sold today as premium biomass pellets.
Is this the same as olive-pomace oil?
It comes from the same cake, but no. Pomace oil is extracted from the residue with solvent and refined; the fuel is simply the dried, compressed cake burned for heat.
Is burning it environmentally sound?
It reuses a by-product that would otherwise be waste, and the carbon released was recently absorbed by the tree. Like any solid fuel it still produces smoke, so proper drying and a good stove matter.
People are amazed the olive gives twice, but in the trade it gives three or four times over — oil, then cheap pomace oil, then fuel, then fertiliser. Nothing leaves the mill unused. If you take one thing from this, let it be the flip side: the cheap ‘olive oil’ that undercuts everything on the shelf is refined from this very cake. Knowing that makes the price gap between a pomace oil and a real extra virgin suddenly make sense.
Written from olive-milling practice and public references on pomace, olive-pit biomass and pomace-oil refining.