Engineering Oilseeds for Industry

Over the last century the world has become dependant on fossil fuels as the primary source of hydrocarbons for energy and industry. These resources are finite and non renewable and their exploitation releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The identification of sustainable replacements has been an ongoing area of research for many years. Plant triacylglycerol (TAG) oils have shown considerable potential to replace petrochemicals in a wide variety of applications ranging from fuel and lubricants to the manufacture of polymers, surfactants, and surface coatings. Their utilization by these industries has however been limited by a number of factors, the most important being the inability of vegetable oil production to compete with the low price of mineral oil. The vegetable oil industry has therefore focused on producing oil for food and food processing uses. In 2005 for example, world oilseed production exceeded 390 million metric tonnes (MMT) yielding over 115 MMT of oil (Gunstone 2006). Less than 20% of this is estimated to have entered the industrial market. With the recent rapid increase in crude oil prices and the focus of political attention on renewable energy and bio-sustainability, the market for vegetable oils is beginning to undergo some fundamental changes. Currently this is lead by the demand for vegetable oil for the manufacture of biodiesel, as illustrated by the more than 3 fold increase in biodiesel production in the US from 25 million gallons in 2004 to 78 million gallons in 2005 (www.emerging-markets.com). It is important to realize that although biodiesel production has clear environmental benefits (Hill et al. 2006; Schubert 2006) it is not a viable replacement for fossil fuels in transportation and energy usage. The reason for this is that it is simply not possible to produce enough oil to substitute for more than a fraction of our current petroleum consumption. An area where vegetable oils show long term potential, either as TAG or as a source of fatty acids, is in higher value applications such as lubricant manufacture and as industrial raw materials. There are, however, considerable challenges that must be overcome for plant oils to achieve their full potential for many industrial processes. Some of these will be discussed below.