Biobased solutions can be a win-win-win option
By Dr. Selim Erhan, TLT Editor | TLT From the Editor September 2025
Many high functioning molecules exist all around us in nature.
Summer is over and energized thinkers are back to their drawing boards, working on new developments for the coming year. This may be a new formula or a change in an existing formula. It could also be a problem lingering in the past months or years. In all cases we obviously need new ideas. Here we need to make a distinction between new ideas and new materials. Often people look for what is new—what is the latest in literature or papers? Most of the time the newer materials may have improved designs to address past problems. But sometimes it is just a name change or designed for another problem, not ours. What I want to suggest is that existing materials that we have not tried may be as good and in fact “new” to us.
I believe biobased materials are a good example. We know nature is harmonious. Plants, animals, humans, insects, rocks, water and all creatures function best when they are connected. Therefore, one would think that all these complicated weather patterns, water and wind flow, power surges, electromagnetic waves and huge temperature variations would need very complex, very adoptable chemistries to make the organisms coexist and function well. So, one would think that if we wanted a very high functioning molecule or a design, it may already exist around us. They are not new, but seemingly just perfect for what they are designed for. Water has existed for billions of years, yet no one questions its abilities or tries to make it better. I had a molecular biologist friend. She was working on proteins. She said there were specific enzymes in nature that allowed them to cut a protein wherever they needed to cut it. She said it looked like these enzyme tools were created to make research possible!
I have worked with vegetable oils for most of my career, and I am always amazed at the variety, the chemical diversity, of what we simply label as oil. It is as if we had made a wish list millions of years ago and they were made for us waiting to be used. An example is Vernonia oil. This oil has epoxy groups, but all the epoxy groups are on the same positions on the triglyceride chains. This way the oil is not viscous. The paint industry uses oils with epoxy groups in their formulations to enable polymerization after being applied so that the paint will form a useful coating. Soybean was a cheap, plentiful starting material with plenty of double bonds on its hydrocarbon chains that would allow easy epoxidation. The issue was that after the epoxidation reaction, the epoxy groups were randomly placed sometimes on the ninth carbon, sometimes on the twelfth carbon, and this scattered pattern increased hydrogen bonding and made the epoxidized oil very viscous. This was remedied by adding solvents that would evaporate after the application, leaving the epoxy groups to open and polymerize the chains. But then the evaporating solvents became a health issue.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had started a worldwide program where they collected as many seeds from as many plants around the world as possible and studied them. Vernonia seed was one such plant and the study showed it was a natural epoxy oil, and the epoxy groups were placed in such a pattern that hydrogen bonding was minimum, and the viscosity of the oil did not increase. So, if this oil is used there is no need for solvents. If you ask why it is not used, it is because the plant only grows in Africa. Maybe the U.S. could trade with the African countries in return for something they don’t have, and we would have a win for health, a win for not needing epoxidation reactions at great expense and a win for cost as all we would need to do would be to pick and crush the seed, which is a lower costing process.
A different triglyceride, soybean oil, is a wonderful process oil for making tires. A win for health as it is not toxic, a win for functionality as its performance is better than even aromatic oils, which had to be banned for health reasons, and a win for low cost. Now here critics would jump in and say soybean oil may cost approximately 20%-100% more than naphthenic oils, but we only need half as much, which equalizes the cost. In fact, it will be cheaper when we look at the bigger picture because soybean oil adds more benefits. When used as process oil, soybean lowers mixing energy leading to economic gains and at the same time lowering the manufacturing plants’ carbon footprint. Another benefit is that formulators can make better tires by putting in more higher functioning materials into the space saved from the process oil. An example is that soybean oil-containing tires have better tear strength which can increase the life of the tire. This also would mean reducing the amount of wear particles which we breathe in when they become airborne. This has become a serious health concern. In one study they saw that some tires lost two pounds of weight per life while others lost eight pounds. One estimate was that globally tires emit around 3 million tons of particles annually.
Another example I saw was from transformer fluids. When vegetable oils can be used, they form a protective layer preventing water from getting into the insulating paper surrounding the coils. Water disintegrates paper, significantly shortening the life of a transformer. Not only does vegetable oil protect against water but it also sucks existing water out of the paper increasing the expected life of the transformer.
The list goes on and on, but in short it seems that there are a lot of biomaterials made for us, waiting to be used, so why not use them?
Dr. Selim Erhan is president of Erbur Solutions in Trout Valley, Ill. You can reach him at selim.erhan@outlook.com.