A Diverse and Sustainable Biodiesel Supply Chain Optimisation Model Based on Properties Integration

Producing sustainable biodiesel from oil crops has been a great challenge, especially for oil crops plantations that involve various small and medium stakeholders. Differences in plantation activities and environments create a unique sustainability profile for each oil crop that may impose more sustainability issues such as deforestation problems in oil palm plantations. This paper embraced the unique sustainability index profile of each oil crop, and an investigation was performed to evaluate the feasibility of integrating multiple oil crops into the existing biodiesel refinery to improve its economic and sustainability performances. The selection of the process feed is proposed to be based on oil crop properties such as iodine value, peroxide value and saturated and unsaturated fatty acid contents. The sustainability profiles considered in the study include deforestation, oil yield, fertiliser impact, water impact and carbon footprint. Case studies demonstrated that a more balanced sustainability index profile could be achieved at a higher production cost—from USD 6.43 billion·y−1 in a cost-saving-centric solution to USD 39.90 billion·y−1 in a sustainability-improvement-centric solution. The study provided excellent insight into the impact on production cost to achieve sustainability which can help stakeholders to evaluate the feasibility of integrating multiple oil crops in the system.