Depletion of fossil fuels has initiated significant research towards utilization of biomass as a source of renewable energy. The empty fruit bunch (EFB) biomass waste was considered as potential source of renewable energy. In this study, the biomass was characterized by the ultimate, proximate and thermogravimetric analyses. Thermogravimetric analysis on EFB indicated that the hemicelluloses and cellulose decomposition occurred in the temperature range of 200–400 °C while the lignin decomposition finished at approximately 500–550 °C. The EFB sample was pyrolysed in a thermogravimetric (TG) analyser furnace in nitrogen atmosphere under dynamic non-isothermal conditions at different heating rates of 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 and 40 °C /min until the maximum temperature of 1000 °C was reached. The isoconversional model-free Flynn–Wall–Ozawa (FWO) method was used to estimate the experimental TG data to yield the average activation energy and pre-exponential factor of 223.92 kJmol−1 and 66.09 min−1, respectively. The model-fitting Coats-Redfern method was also applied to estimate the activation energy and ln A for EFB pyrolysis from the experimental TG data at each heating rate. The apparent Ea values were in the range of 70.968 – 73.537 kJmol−1 for heating rates from 10 to 40 °C /min with the calculated average activation energy of 72.470 kJmol−1 and ln A of 10.361 min−1.