We have broadly three sources of oils - petroleum, animal, and vegetable.

By vegetable oil I am referring to oils gotten from plant sources. Examples include palm oil, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, avocado oil, jojoba oil, olive oil, corn oil, jatropha oil, peanut oil, orange pill oil, star apple seed oil etc.

Some of these oils are edible others are not but the good thing is that all the oils are extremely useful in various fields of human endeavour. The oils have application in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and confectionary.

A few of the industrial application of vegetable oils are highlighted in this write-up:

1. In Fuel Production: edible and non-edible type, fresh and waste stock of vegetable oils are converted to diesel for driving of vehicles and powering of generators. It smokes less and has favouravle cetane value.

2. In Oil Paint Production: Acrylic serves as binder in water paint while alkyd resyd performs the same function in oil paint. Alkyd resyd is obtained by modifying vegetable oils using readily available chemical feedstock.

3. Drilling Mud Production: The two popular broad categories of drilling mud used in petroleum and water borehole drilling are water based and oil based mud. Water based though environmentally friendly has its drawback as it is not suitable for high temperature well formation. An alternative to it has been oil based mud using Diesel as carrier. With heightened environmental concern of diesel based mud, vegetable oil based mud has proven to be a candidate of choice.

4. Detergent Feedstock: Detergent technology has been evolving over the years with linear akylbenzene sulphonate (LAS) being the choice candidate as a result of it biodegradability. LAS can be obtained by sulphonation of vegetable oil at appropriate process conditions.

The benefits of vegetable oil are great and the list appears to be endless.

Id Oduok is a Graduate Student of Chemical Engineering, specializing in Process Design. His research interest is Industrial Application of Vegetable Oils. A field he has been working on since his undergraduate research. He covers extraction, characterization, refining, and utilization of various vegetable oils. He also designs, simulate, model, and builds pilot scale equipment/plants in this field of interest.

Follow him on odfidtechnicalworld..com. Also on academia.edu.ng/idoduok. Visit his Technical Center in Eket, Akwa Ibom State. Nigeria

I plan to begin refining palm kernel oil as I am currently producing the crude pko.
What can it cost to set up a 3ton pko refining line?
Thanks