Does Palm Oil Solidify?

Palm Oil is the world’s most widely used vegetable oil, consumed mainly for cooking and food preparation; now it is rapidly increasing its presence in the industrial sector, especially within the biofuels energy market. It’s a highly traded product, produced by and large, in Malaysia and Indonesia, for shipping all over the world.  It is used very much within the limelight these days as a potential substitute for rapeseed oil to generate biodiesel in Europe.

There are some obvious perks of heading in such a direction: Palm oil is not only more cost-effective, but it’s also less weighty on the atmosphere; while rapeseed oil requires an input of 60% of fossil fuels to produce a given amount of energy, feeding the environment a heavy dose of greenhouse gas emissions, that number is cut as much by half to produce energy through palm oil. The downside has to do with a practical consideration: Outside of its native country, palm oil goes solid at 41°C (106°F) (it’s sometimes referred to as palm fat.)

Transportation alone of the oil is no easy task: It’s a very meticulous process as the oil is no longer pump-able if it solidifies on account of a temperature drop.  Often, through the processes of loading, transport and unloading, transporters gradually raise the temperature of the storage unit within transport from 26.5° (80° F) to 50°C (122°F) to keep the product in a liquid, pump-able state. It has to be done right, because if the oil does solidify, there’s no turning back. Although it can be reheated for cooking purposes within the kitchen, forced heating in the tanks, in such a close vicinity to the heating coils, will cause the oil to singe, discolor and become rancid. Such is a potential issue in trade, but one that can be overcome when the proper procedures are put in place by transporters.

Far more complicated is the use of palm oil as a biofuel, especially in a region like Western Europe, where much interest is driven by the subject, but also where temperatures tend to go well below the freezing point of the oil (24.1°C) during the winter. As a result, most palm oil is incompatible with many European motor engines, and the merging of the palm oil industry with that of biofuels technology has yet to take off. Meanwhile, however, research is being done by Asian scientists who are looking to modify palm oil to prevent it from solidifying at “low” temperatures so that larger percentages can be used in the biodiesel blend.

Regardless of its fate in the automobile industry, most palm oil production serves culinary purposes anyway, sometimes in traditional Asian dishes in its unrefined state, but usually manufactured and bottled into a cooking oil for personal use and appearing as an ingredient in popular food items such as margarine, baked goods, instant noodles, baby formula, cake mixes, breakfast bars, potato chips, and crackers. In any temperate climate, palm oil is more of a fat than it is oil. It can be kept at a high temperature to prevent solidity in the short term, but if it’s being stored during a period over two weeks it can’t be exposed to too much heat or pressure or it will quickly oxidize and become rancid. As a saturated fat, it’s one of the denser vegetable oils, not smooth like a teaspoon of canola oil across a pan, but far better off in terms of rancidity-prevention when it’s preserved properly.