Derrick Allotey shares with the research community at NABEC 2023 on Eco-efficiency Analysis of Scenario-based Industrial Pea Protein Processing.
July 23, 2019
On the second day of the North-East Agricultural and Biological Engineering Conference,
Mr Derrick Allotey presented on "Eco-efficiency of Hybrid Fractionation Pathways for Plant Protein Production:
A Techno-eco-environmental Trade-off Analysis", a
project in collaboration with the National Research Council on the Sustainable Protein Program.
In Mr. Allotey's presentation, he shared key questions that have bothered different plant protein industry stakeholders.
Some of these questions include (a) how does a practitioner determine the appropriateness of the hybrid fraction method
for a given protein extraction process? (b) to what extent do the stakeholder preferences affect the choice of an optimal
pathway for pea protein extraction? and more importantly, (c) what trade-offs exist when a practitioner decides on the optimal
pathway to select.
He also shared a holistic method framework that captures a techno-economic assessment, environmental impact assessment,
eco-efficiency, multicriteria, and trade-off analysis to address the above-mentioned wicked problems within the protein extraction industry.
Mr. Allotey then demonstrated the applicability of the framework through five case studies of previous research by Jeganathan et al. 2023,
Dumoulin et al. 2021, Pelgrom et al. 2015a, Ruiz et al. 2016, and Talab et al. 2016.
Some primary insights shared during the presentation highlighted variations in the CAPEX,
OPEX and Net Present value for the alternative hybrid fractionation methods. Most interesting,
in the trade-off analysis, Mr Allotey emphasized on one key statement "for a 10% gain in economic
gains leads to 110% more environmental impact", while drawing the audience's attention to the fact
that stakeholders must be willing to compromise one thing to gain another.
In concluding his presentation, Mr. Allotey mentioned that hybrid fraction processes are economically
profitable and that incorporating product quality into eco-efficiency assessment provides a better understanding
of the choice of hybrid fractionation configuration to select.