A global overview of vegetable oils, with reference to biodiesel - A Report for the IEA Bioenergy Task 40

Jun 2009

There are various factors that affect the feedstock and market for vegetable oils, such as:
i) Increasing demand sparked off by higher consumption of edible oils, particularly in emerging countries. For example, according to USDA, between 2004 and 2008 the annual global growth rate of domestic consumption of vegetable oils was 3.9%; for China and India this was 3.4% and 2.4%, respectively. Although this percentage may appear low, given the size of the Chinese and Indian market, the impact in the international market is very large;
ii) The development of the biofuels industry (and more specifically biodiesel) around the world, particularly in the EU, USA, Argentina, Brazil, China and India,
iii) Price increases which have been due to varying factors e.g. increase in oil prices, low stock worldwide, droughts, and speculation. Until demand and supply reach some kind of equilibrium, ups-and-downs in this market will continue.
A fourth factor seems to be changing weather patterns that will have different geographical impacts, but which can be potentially quite large e.g. 2007/2008 adverse weather conditions resulted in approximately 14 Mt reduction in production. The combination of all these factors, and in particular the accelerated demand since 2005/06, are bound to cause major changes to this industry though such changes are still difficult to foresee.
The first section of this study summarises the global production and consumption of the main vegetable oils; section two looks at the global production including biodiesel; section three assesses the major international players of the vegetable oil market, grouped under palm oil, soybean and rapeseed; the following section concentrates on the main producing countries/regions (i.e. Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, EU, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand); section five pays particular attention to merging markets and new vegetable oil crops such as Jatropha, and other major vegetable oils; section six assesses some policy issues; section seven examines some environmental and sustainability issues (very briefly, since this was not originally an integral part of this study). Finally, section eight highlights the major conclusions and findings of the report.

By: F. Rosillo-Calle (Imperial College London), L. Pelkmans (VITO), A.Walter (UNICA)

 
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