Beyond biofuels: economic opportunities, recent advances and challenges in property modeling for vegetable oils

Despite the greater attention given to biofuels application in the literature, there are many economic and environmental drivers to use vegetables oils (VOs) as a renewable feedstock for other applications. These drivers are discussed in the present work and the technological challenges imposed by this shift towards new VOs uses are also discussed. They are mainly associated to the reaction routes issues, the performance regarding end-user properties, experimental procedures and property prediction models. The need for more holistic approaches (life cycle analysis) is briefly discussed and the potential benefits arising from new computer-aided tools are highlighted as well.