Spain Bets on Biorefineries to Find New Revenue for Small Producers

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The per­sis­tently low olive oil prices that have plagued Spanish pro­duc­ers for more than a year now are forc­ing some to look for addi­tional value else­where in the pro­duc­tion process.

Acesur, one of the word’s largest olive oil pro­duc­ers, has teamed up with sev­eral other agri­cul­tural firms and researchers on a new project with the aim of cre­at­ing value from the waste prod­ucts that result from olive oil extrac­tion.

Under the aus­pices of the Alpeocel project, the col­lab­o­ra­tors plan to develop new biore­fin­ery processes in order to turn alpe­orujo – a mix­ture of water, olive skins, stones and pulp – into other com­pounds that may be used in the man­u­fac­turer of fer­til­iz­ers, cos­met­ics and bio­mass.

While these processes already exist on larger scales in Spain as well as else­where in the European Union, the hope for this ini­tia­tive is to cre­ate small-scale biore­finer­ies in rural areas.

“It is a pio­neer­ing ini­tia­tive in Spain in which we aim to apply the biore­fin­ery model to exist­ing facil­i­ties, such as the olive groves, expand­ing its scope and thus allow­ing it to improve [the groves’] tech­ni­cal-eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal via­bil­ity,” said Fátima Vargas from the Ainia biotech­nol­ogy depart­ment, which is pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal assis­tance to the project.

“Furthermore, we can find syn­er­gies between the new biore­fin­ery processes and the avail­able pro­cess­ing tech­nolo­gies to obtain a wide spec­trum of new bio­prod­ucts and bioen­ergy,” she added.

According to Ainia, a non-profit focused on agribusi­ness, roughly 80 per­cent of the olives that are processed in mills are turned into alpe­orujo. It is esti­mated that for every pound of olives that are trans­formed into oil, between a pound (0.45 kilo­grams) and 2.5 pounds (1.13 kilo­grams) of alpe­orujo is cre­ated.

Due to the chem­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of these byprod­ucts and large quan­ti­ties that are yielded, pro­duc­ers usu­ally need to pay to have the residue removed, adding another cost to their bud­get.

Acesur and its col­lab­o­ra­tors are bet­ting that the incor­po­ra­tion of biore­finer­ies to these small-scale pro­duc­tion sites will turn that cost into an addi­tional stream of rev­enue.

However, it remains unclear exactly how many of these biore­finer­ies will be built, which pro­duc­ers will be able to ben­e­fit and how much added value they biore­finer­ies will bring to the pro­duc­tion process.

Representatives from both Acesur and Ainia said only that the project is at a very early stage and they would know more as it pro­gressed.

The €1.66 mil­lion ($1.87 mil­lion) project is being co-funded by Spain’s Center for the Development of Industrial Technology and the E.U.‘s fund for regional devel­op­ment.

“Small-scale biore­finer­ies in rural areas are a key instru­ment of the new bioe­con­omy pro­moted by the E.U. to opti­mize bio­mass resources,” Vargas said.

The hope is to have these biore­finer­ies fully oper­a­tional in time for the 2021 har­vest, with the first ones being set up in the provinces of Córdoba and Jaén, the lead­ing olive oil pro­duc­ing provinces in the world.

• Ainia
• Acesur