Extracting Value

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By Chris Schnarr

In 1949, after 4.5 billion years of existence, the world population had grown to 2.556 billion people. Over the next 60 years – a rounding error taken in the context of the first 4.5 billion - the world population expanded by more than 250% to 6.7 billion and United Nations estimates suggest we will see another 2.5 billion people by 2050. While there are many alarming implications of this staggering population growth, how the world feeds its population is one of the most important issues among them.

Increasing crop yields by way of hybridization and improved efficiencies in farm infrastructure and methodology will have a net positive effect. India, for example, has built the “world’s largest dairy industry almost entirely on roughage – wheat straw, rice straw, corn stalks, and grass gathered from the road side.” In four provinces in eastern China, where “wheat straw and cornstalks are often used as fuel for cooking, villagers are shifting to other sources of energy for... (fuel)... , which lets them feed the straw and cornstalks to cattle. Supplementing this roughage with small amounts of nitrogen ... allows the digestive system of cattle to convert roughage into animal protein more efficiently.”
During an interview with Nova in December of 2003, Lester Brown, founder of the thinktanks Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute, commented on the additional half billion people that will be added to India’s population by 2050 and possible ways to expand grain production:
“I would be hard pressed to come up with more than some relatively modest increases here and there. We can get 2 per cent here, 5 per cent there and maybe 10 per cent some other place. But the doublings of grain harvests in major producing countries now appears to be history”
With the population expected to increase by more than 2.5 billion hungry mouths over the next 40 years, we will be forced to turn further towards innovation in technology to assist us in increasing agricultural efficiencies.

The competition for protein
For many years, people living in less developed regions lived primarily on starch-based diets as protein from animal sources was less readily available and less affordable. Fuelled by greater purchasing power and urbanisation, diets in developing countries are increasingly shifting towards protein-rich diets. Even with this shift towards greater protein adoption, nations like India and China still consume less protein per capita than more developed regions like Europe and North America. As economic growth in developing regions is expected to continue to outpace those more developed, the likelihood of accelerated global protein demand becomes more certain.
Traditionally, we have derived our proteins from animal sources - poultry, beef, pork, fish, eggs, cheese, etc. But few experts believe that the world can sustain the growth in these sources of protein to meet the oncoming demand. So where do we find additional sources of protein?
Oilseeds (canola, soy, rapeseed, etc.) have abundant levels of high value protein within the raw seed. The canola seed, for example, is comprised of approximately 25 per cent protein. Canadian canola seed production of almost 13 million tonnes per year means that Canadian canola growers are producing over 3 million tonnes of protein every year. Globally, canola/rape seed production was 36 million tonnes in 2003/04 and 46 million tonnes in 2004/05.
Unfortunately, especially in the case of canola, conventional processes designed to maximize the amount of oil that can be extracted from the seed involve the use of very high temperatures to capture the oil. The canola proteins become denatured when exposed to temperatures in excess of 600C for more than a few minutes. When proteins are denatured they lose up to 90 per cent of their nutritive characteristics and also make the final separation of proteins from the remaining fibre in the seeds much more difficult.

A novel approach that could become a global solution
Headquartered in Toronto, Bio-Extraction Inc. has developed a low-temperature technology to extract all of the oil in oil seeds and, most importantly, allows the proteins in the oilseed to remain in their soluble form. By then separating these proteins that have not been denatured from the rest of the fibres, BioExx can produce very valuable “protein isolates” that can offer as much as 2 to 5 times the nutritional food value from every tonne of crop that is harvested – and they can do it without adding a penny of additional cost onto the farmer.
In a typical solvent-based extraction process, the biomass (in this case Canola) is first pre-pressed to expel approximately half of the oil contained in the oilseed. The remaining oil is then removed by ‘washing’ the seed with a solvent that removes 95 to 97% of the remaining oil. This solvent, typically a petrochemical, must then be recovered from the oil and remaining biomass usually referred to as the ‘meal’. These petrochemical based solvents boil at between 65°C and 70°C and to remove them quickly from the oil and the meal, the products are heated with steam to well over 100°C to recover the solvent. This, in turn, exposes the proteins to temperatures well above the 60°C where they start to denature. This conventional process is highly effective in extracting the oil from the seed but highly ineffective in capturing and maintaining the high initial protein value in the seed. The result of this process is a high value oil in demand for food use and a low value ‘meal’ used as an animal feed.
The first stage of the BioExx patented extraction process is almost identical to a conventional approach whereby the oilseed is pre-pressed to expel the majority of the oil. The remaining oil is then similarly removed using a solvent which, in turn, needs to be recovered from the oil and the meal. It is at this point that the BioExx process separates itself from the currently accepted methodology. The solvent used to remove the remaining oil is a patented refrigerant based solvent that has a boiling temperature of approximately minus 20°C. This allows for the solvent recovery process to occur at temperatures less than 50°C - a temperature below the 60°C at which proteins begin to denature. As with the conventional process, the result of the BioExx process is that all of the high value oil is recovered from the seed, but the low value meal is now able to be further separated into extremely high value proteins with only a marginal amount of lower value meal remaining. Instead of using the biomass remaining after the oil is extracted only to feed animals, these proteins can now be used in everything from baby formula to protein shakes and protein additives to help feed the growing demand for human consumable protein.

Not all proteins are created equal
The proteins that BioExx is able to extract using their low-temperature process exhibit excellent solubility. This characteristic increases the protein’s bio-availability – the body’s ability to absorb and utilize a protein. It further provides an indicator of the ability of the protein to dissolve in various liquids under various conditions. In addition, the proteins that BioExx derives from Canola exhibit very low levels of anti-nutrients, especially compared to soy. Anti-nutrients are “compounds which decrease the nutritional value of food, usually by making an essential nutrient unavailable or indigestible when consumed by humans or animals. For example, phytate, a common component of most seeds and cereals, forms a complex with many important minerals. This complex ensures that less of the minerals are available and inhibits the body’s ability to benefit from the available proteins.” Further, the proteins from Canola that BioExx produces have been estimated by researchers to have as much as double the Protein Efficiency Ratio of similar proteins derived from other vegetables. This means that humans can get twice the nutritive value from a gram of BioExx canola protein as one can from proteins derived from any other plant based protein. In sum, these proteins provide a food value that is close to, or exceeds, the value derived from the world’s best proteins including egg whites and dairy-based proteins.
Canola protein, specifically, has a strong nutritional profile and compares very favourably to soy, casein (cow’s milk), beef and egg whites. They also have an excellent amino acid profile. Inherent in the protein are high levels of key amino acids such as valine, methionine, leucine and isoleucine (important for muscle building), threonine, which is important for brain activity, as well as the sulphur containing amino acids cysteine and methionine which are known to have powerful anti-oxidant properties.
The catalyst for the genesis of Bio-Extraction Inc. was a novel cold-temperature extraction methodology originally created in Europe. Over the years, BioExx has proven the efficacy of this technology by working with partners at the Food Technology Center in Prince Edward Island, the Feeds Innovation Institute and POS Pilot Plant Bioprocessing Services, both located in Saskatchewan. BioExx began its journey starting at an extremely small-scale laboratory testing facility and progressed through an intermediate size batch processing plant to arrive at its first full scale continuous counter flow plant in Saskatoon. The plant is now operating on a 24/7 basis and, at full capacity, will see throughput of 40,000 metric tonnes per year.
Through the use of an innovative low-temperature extraction technology, this Canadian-based company has been able to realize the true inherent value of one of Canada’s (and the world’s) most important agricultural resources. This technology is also applicable to other oilseeds including Soy and Rapeseed. Through its growing capacity, BioExx is contributing to a paradigm–shifting solution to the oncoming global food shortages that will almost certainly occur as the population continues to grow at such an incredible rate.

References
1.     Brown, Lester R., Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Earth Policy Institute, 2008) Chapter 9, pages 54,55
2.     NOVA: World in the Balance: The People Paradox,” Interview conducted in December 2003 by Sarah Holt
3.     4 GEO-PIE Project. “Plant Toxins and Antinutrients”. Cornell University.