Soybean oils are increasingly being used for a range of non-food applications, including production of
biofuels and oleochemicals. While most soybean oil is produced by hexane-based extraction methods,concern about environmental and health effects
in development of aqueous extraction methods. Among aqueous methods,surfactant-based aqueous
extraction of vegetable oils has shown particular promise as an alternative to hexane-based extraction
methods. The objectives of this work were to explore the use of surfactant-based methods for the extraction of soybean oils, and to test whether the use of mixed anionic–cationic and anionic–cationic–nonionic
surfactant mixtures could successfully be used to reduce the salinity requirements for surfactant-based
extraction. All three formulations tested were capable of producing ultra-low (