Without whale oil

Press, 9 May 1980, Page 12

Without whale oil

Bacteria and a desert bush could help save the sperm whale from extinction, providing effective substitutes for whale oil. Cheap substitutes, too. A third alternative, a complex blend of fatty acids and esters made by Witco in'Britain, has not sold well, because it is more expensive than the whalebased product. Since the United States banned imports of sperm whale oil in 1970, American companies have been hungry for good substitutes for use in cosmetics and as fine industrial lubricants.

A cheap alternative could prompt other countries to get virtuous about not using sperm whale oil. Commercial money is going into two promising developments: genetically engineered bugs and the jojoba plant. . Backed bv Standard Oil of Indiana. Cc-tus Corporation of California is pioneering the genetic engineering approach. The idea is to use genetically modified bacteria to improve on nature. The bugs would produce

oils with the qualities that make sperm whale oil attractive: a fairly constant viscosity, over a wide range of temperatures, and an excellent ability to protect metals from wear. They would even have one advantage over whale oil. The oils could be tailor-made to fit users’ requirements, appropriate bugs producing oils of different viscosities and compositions. Standard Oil reckons the market for such lubricants could be worth anywhere between SIOM and SIOOM a year—if the Cetus bugs perform and scaling up the process to commercial production proves practicable.. But the two companies admit that at least five more years of research is needed before the bacteria can hope to oil the wheels of industry. Jojoba also needs more development. About 4500 acres of the crop have already been planted in the south-western United States and in Mexico. But little of it is mature enough to begin producing oil seeds — jojoba needs five years to mature.

So nobody is sure how the economies of large-scale production will work out.

The target is a price of $1 about 2kg jojoba oil. That may prove optimistic. To achieve it, two problems need to be solved.’ The first is finding a mechanical method of harvesting the seeds. The answer here may lie in modifications to conventional grape-picking machines. The second problem —extracting the oil from the seeds—is tougher. Crushing machines can easily get out the first 50 per cent of the oil. But chemical extraction is needed to get at the rest, and, so far, there have been problems in removing the residual solvent from the leached-out seed mash. That matters. The mash has a 30 per cent protein content. Growers want to be able to sell it for animal feed.

But they are optimistic that these problems can be overcome—say, in five years time. And, if so, they reckon that jojoba could not only supply animal feed and oil for industry but also the first zero-calorie cooking oil.