Oil spills concern the public as they are incredibly harmful to the environment and the economy. A collection of business frameworks has been created to control oil spills, such as the utilization of agricultural wastes as sorbents. This paper demonstrates the use of raw and modified fibre from empty bunches of palm fruit, a low-cost adsorbent material for the oil spill in the marine environment. To improve fibre's sorption capacity, the fibre was modified by esterification using oleic acid. The modified fibre was tested to adsorb crude oil in a batch system (Tapis and Arabian). The extent of modification was given according to weight percent gain (WPG), which was calculated on the basis of difference in weight before and after the treatment. To increase the esterification productivity, an optimization study was conducted at various concentrations of oleic acid and temperature, and achieved higher WPG (with 4.32) and subsequently higher oil sorption capacity of 5.8 and 5.96 g/g for Tapis and Arabian crude oil, respectively. Besides, this study also focused on correspondence of surface functional groups of the adsorbent using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrum, surface morphology by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and measure the contact angle using Interfacial Tension. Two well-known adsorption kinetic and isotherm models of sorbents were utilized to explain the mechanism of adsorption of oil onto the modified OPEFB fibre. The predicted result exemplified that, Pseudo-second-order model from the kinetic and Langmuir model from isotherm study were well represented to remove crude oil onto the treated OPEFB fibre regarding the highest correlation coefficient (R2) and closely of maximum crude oil adsorption in theoretical (q0) and experimental (qe) data. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.