Elsevier

Biochimie

Volume 91, Issue 6, June 2009, Pages 665-670
Biochimie

Mini-review
Plant oils as feedstock alternatives to petroleum – A short survey of potential oil crop platforms

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biochi.2009.03.021Get rights and content

Abstract

Our society is highly depending on petroleum for its activities. About 90% is used as an energy source for transportation and for generation of heat and electricity and the remaining as feedstocks in the chemical industry. However, petroleum is a finite source as well as causing several environmental problems such as rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Petroleum therefore needs to be replaced by alternative and sustainable sources. Plant oils and oleochemicals derived from them represent such alternative sources, which can deliver a substantial part of what is needed to replace the petroleum used as feedstocks.

Plant derived feedstock oils can be provided by two types of oil qualities, multi-purpose and technical oils. Multi-purpose oils represent oil qualities that contain common fatty acids and that can be used for both food and feedstock applications. Technical oil qualities contain unusual fatty acids with special properties gained from their unique molecular structure and these types of oils should only be used for feedstock applications. As a risk mitigation strategy in the selection of crops, technical oil qualities should therefore preferably be produced by oil crop platforms dedicated for industrial usage.

This review presents a short survey of oil crop platforms to be considered for either multi-purpose or technical oils production. Included among the former platforms are some of the major oil crops in cultivation such as oil palm, soybean and rapeseed. Among the later are those that could be developed into dedicated industrial platforms such as crambe, flax, cotton and Brassica carinata. The survey finishes off by highlighting the potential of substantial increase in plant oil production by developing metabolic flux platforms, which are starch crops converted into oil crops.

Introduction

Our society is widely dependent on petroleum for its activities. About 90% of the petroleum consumed annually (about 4000 million metric tonnes in 2007) is used as an energy source for transportation and for generation of heat and electricity (Fig. 1). The remaining 10% is used by the petrochemical and chemical industry as raw material (feedstock) in the manufacturing of products such as chemical feedstocks, solvents, lubricants, plastics, synthetic rubbers and fibers, detergents and others. Since it is a finite resource, petroleum prices will inevitably escalate when this resource becomes limiting [1]. A recent example of this came in the mid of 2008 when the price for a barrel of oil reached almost $150. Such development will have a major negative impact on our economy and society. The use of petroleum is also adding a net input of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which gives rise to an increase in the average temperature of the earth and the oceans. If not contained, this global warming process will have widespread influences on the environment, which eventually will threaten our way of living. Hence, there are ample reasons for why petroleum needs to be replaced by alternative and sustainable sources of energy and industrial feedstocks in the near future.

Section snippets

Plant oils as replacements

The compositions of most seed oils, including oils from all our annual oil crops, are made up of a wide range of fatty acids with six dominating fatty acids: palmitic, stearic, oleic, linoleic and linolenic acids, having chain lengths of 16 and 18 carbons and lauric acids having 12 carbon chains and found in the seed kernels of coconut and oil palm. Alongside these are a great number of unusual fatty acids produced by wild plant species. Such fatty acids include those with chain lengths between

Prospects of using plant oils as alternative feedstocks

The feedstock molecules mentioned in the previous section can be provided by two types of oil qualities, multi-purpose oils and technical oils. When considering the type of oil crops to deliver the two types of feedstock oils it can be noted that as much as 90% of the plant oil used annually in the world is produced by only six oil crops, which are oil palm, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, peanut and cotton [5]. They all produce multi-purpose oils with a composition that is dominated by the mono-

Oil crop platforms

A successful development of oleochemical-based feedstocks for global markets is critically dependent on the effectiveness and cost competitiveness of the strategies chosen for the production of the industrial oils. The choice of crop platform is of great significance and there are several criteria in the selection process of crop alternatives that are important. The produced oil should be of high quality and renders a low price, which highlights the importance of yield and agronomy. To avoid

Oil crop platforms producing multi-purpose oils

Since multi-purpose oils are oil qualities composed of the same fatty acids that are found in food oils, there are no concerns about admixing with the food chain. Consequently, most of the oil crops presently in cultivation can be considered as such oil crop platforms, especially the four major ones, which are palm oil tree, soybean, rapeseed and sunflower [5]. Their importance for the global plant oil production is substantial and it is striking the growth in the production of oils from

Oil crop platforms producing technical oils

Due to the specific properties of technical oil qualities given by their content of unusual fatty acids they are not suited for food purposes. As risk mitigation therefore, it is desirable that production of such oils is accomplished in crop platforms dedicated for non-food oils. The following is a selection of such crop platforms that either traditionally is used for non-food oil production or has low risk of mixing with oil crops used for food production.

Oil crop platforms for biofuel production

As already stated above, plant oils should preferably be used in substituting petroleum as industrial feedstocks rather than replacing it in fuel and energy applications. Still having said this, it is evident that one of the renewable alternatives that recently have increasingly come into use to replace fossil liquid fuels is biodiesel. A fuel that today is produced from plant oils with common fatty acids such as rapeseed, soybean and palm oil. The recent increase in biodiesel production has

Metabolic flux platforms – starch to oil crops

Oil has much higher density than starch and hence more energy per volume (oil having 2.25 times more energy than starch and proteins) [59]. An approach to significantly increase the yield of oil per hectare is therefore to convert high starch crops into oil crops producing multi-purpose oils. Realistically such type of oil crops will need a long time to develop since it requires advancement in our understanding of the mechanism by which carbon flow is directed into accumulation as starch and

Acknowledgements

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA/SAREC) and the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS) are gratefully acknowledged for financial support.

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