Published May 2023
The demand for oleic acid has been increasing in the healthcare industry. Oleic acid is also used in other industries like cosmetic and personal care, textile, food and beverages, chemicals, and others. The production of oleic acid from crude palm oil (CPO) is discussed in this review. The CPO extraction process has been outlined in PEP Review RW2022-15 Decarbonizing a Palm Oil Mill and Refinery.
The feedstocks of tallow, coconut oil, tall oil and paraffins have been discussed in PEP Report RP42 Fatty Acids but the feedstock of CPO was not covered. Therefore, CPO feedstock is discussed in this review. This Process Economics Program (PEP) review provides a techno-economic assessment of production of oleic acid from CPO where oleic acid is the main product and palmitic acid, lauric acid and myristic acid are the byproducts. The production economics assessment has been done for a plant, located at the United States Gulf Coast (USGC) region, with an annual production capacity of 235.5 million pounds a year. An iPEP Navigator module, which is an Excel-based computer costing model developed by S&P Global Commodity Insights, is also attached with this report to allow a quick calculation of the process economics for other major regions — Germany, Japan and mainland China — along with conversion between English and metric units.
The technological and economic assessments of the processes are PEP team’s independent interpretation of a potential commercial process based on the information presented in the open literature, such as patents or technical articles. Although they may not reflect in whole or in part the actual plant configuration, we do believe that they are sufficiently representative of the process and process economics within the range of accuracy necessary for economic evaluation of the conceptual process designs