Impact of biodiesel production on a soybean biorefinery

Biodiesel, mainly produced from soybean, is an alternative to replace fossil fuels and to decrease the Brazilian external dependence on petrochemical diesel. However, soybean represents almost 85% of biodiesel production costs and government subsidies are necessary in order to make biodiesel production feasible. A possible solution to this problem is to look to the steps upstream of alkaline transesterification, like oil extraction and refining, where co-products can be isolated, making the soybean processing chain a biorefinery. This work aims to economically evaluate this idea and to show the real impact of biodiesel and the co-products on the biorefinery profitability. Operational and economic parameters were obtained from literature and were adjusted according to time, place, and flowrate. As a result, it is shown that biodiesel production can be profitable, but it should not be seen as the main destination for soybean and provided there is a market for its other fractions. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.