Extracting Oil NPDC helps project to enhance the value of nuisance eastern redcedar trees Over the decades, the invasive eastern redcedar tree has taken over more and more land in Oklahoma. Much of the managed eastern redcedar is burned, turned into mulch or fashioned into posts, but researchers are still looking for any value-added products that can be made from it.
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The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry (ODAFF) and the New Product Development Center (NPDC) at OSU collaborated on a possible solution: to continuously extract oil from eastern redcedar.
annual control of eastern redcedar is a $15 million investment, with $7.5 million from landowners and $7.5 million from the USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program.
“The NPDC aims to assist Oklahoma communities by providing value-added engi“The goal of the project with neering and business services,” the NPDC was to create a says Robert Taylor, NPDC unique continuous extraction director. “We employ a team process that would make it of engineering and business more viable to get oil out of professionals, coupled with the eastern redcedar tree and undergraduate and graduate still have byproducts availstudent interns, to identify able to produce energy from and solve challenges that the remaining fiber,” says Jim improve the economic, and Reese, Oklahoma secretary sometimes societal, well-being of agriculture. “We wanted of Oklahoma.” to make an existing process more valuable and effective Approximately 12.6 million for Oklahoma.” acres in Oklahoma are considered forested. Eastern With support from ODAFF, redcedar makes up 600,000 NPDC design engineers acres with an estimated total developed a model for of 462 million trees. The
BY ERIN LARSON
extracting oil from eastern redcedar. Terri Ventress, NPDC-Stillwater senior design engineer, analyzed an oil extraction process using redcedar shavings to produce a value-added product. Ventress began the process by producing a batch experiment to test the temperature and residence times. She found that up to 2 percent of a cedar tree’s weight can be extracted for oil. The batch of cedar shavings was bathed in steam. From the steam, the oil rose to the surface and was collected. The process was adjusted by the dependent variables such as temperature profile and residence time. Each batch and test run provided a comparison of chemical analysis to improve the concept.
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