Cargill strikes deals to sell novel polyols (vegetable oil based products)

It's good to see major chemical companies like Cargill start offering vegetable-oil based chemical feedstocks as opposed to the traditional petroleum/natural gas feedstocks. You will likely see these new chemicals make their first major impact in polyurethanes (foams like cushion seats, and protective coatings as are used for furnitures).

This is a benefit of high crude oil prices which give us high gasoline prices. Research has been going on for years in this area of using renewable resources for developing products, however, the cost of petroleum was often low enough to make it uneconomical to switch.

Should this field expand in industry, it would be a nice new source of revenue for the country (assuming it is a crop like soybeans which are massed produced here) and slightly reduce our dependence on fossile fuels

Cargill strikes deals to sell novel polyols

Cargill has reached agreements to sell commercial quantities of its vegetable-oil-based polyols to the polyurethane foam producers Woodbridge Group and Hickory Springs Manufacturing. Polyols are traditionally derived from propylene oxide and an alcohol, but Cargill is making them by introducing hydroxy functionality to vegetable oil triglycerides. Dimitri Dounis, corporate director of marketing and R&D at Hickory Springs, says the new polyols "are not only more environmentally responsible but also bring performance improvements."


http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/84/i11/html/8411busc.html#11

at that time, they were the largest privately owned company in the world. They treated me really well. I don't know about now though. Things can change. They owned subsidiary's all over the world. Sounds like they are still working to improve things.

Edited for spelling, my bad.