In October 2023, Mr. Yan Zipeng — deputy to the Henan Provincial People’s Congress, vice president of the Oil Branch of the Chinese Cereals and Oils Association, and chairman of Henan Huatai Intelligent Equipment Group — flew to Bolivia with Mrs. Jully Zhang, Huatai’s general manager for the South American market, to visit a customer the company had been working with for twelve years.
The customer is Inolsa. The relationship did not start with a big order. It started in 2011, with a single 100 TPD soybean oil refining line. That line ran for years without drama, which is the only kind of recommendation that actually counts in this business.
From one refining line to a complete 1000 T/D plant
After a round of technical discussions between the two engineering teams, part of the 2011 equipment was upgraded. The result was close to 30% more throughput, and a clear drop in energy consumption per ton of oil — the two numbers plant owners actually watch.
In 2021, Inolsa ordered the whole thing: a complete 1000 T/D soybean pretreatment, extraction and refining plant. Huatai designed and built it, shipped it, and commissioned it at the beginning of 2023. It has been running steadily since.
- Pretreatment — cleaning, de-stoning, cracking, conditioning, flaking and expanding. Bean moisture and flake thickness are set to the extraction targets, not to a catalogue average.
- Solvent extraction — a belt or loop extractor sized for 1000 T/D of flakes, with a full desolventising-toasting (DTDC) section so the meal leaves at a safe, saleable specification.
- Refining — degumming, neutralising, bleaching and deodorising, with the deodoriser running under vacuum at high temperature to strip free fatty acids and odour compounds.
- Utilities and control — steam, condensate recovery, solvent recovery with vent absorption, and a central control room so the whole line is run from one screen.
Why the line was laid out this way
A 1000 T/D plant is not a 100 TPD plant with bigger motors. Once you cross roughly 500 T/D, the economics change shape. Solvent losses that were tolerable at 100 T/D become a serious line item at 1000 T/D. Steam balance starts to drive the layout rather than follow it. And meal quality — specifically the urease activity and protein dispersibility index after toasting — decides what price the meal fetches, which in South America is a large share of the plant’s revenue.
So the extraction section was designed around solvent recovery capacity first, then sized everything else to match. The DTDC was specified with enough residence time to hit meal specifications without over-cooking the protein. Over-toasting is the most common way to quietly destroy margin in a soybean plant, because the meal still looks fine and simply sells for less.
What the customer said
During the visit, the Inolsa team spoke plainly about the equipment. Their chairman put it this way:
“When signing the contract, Huatai promised to provide us with the most advanced soybean oil processing technology and equipment, and Huatai did it. And now we have the most modernized soybean oil plant in Bolivia. The oil and meal indexes are excellent, and the counterparts from Bolivia and the neighbouring countries in South America are competing to visit us.”
He also mentioned something engineers like to hear: “Moreover, it is easy to increase the capacity of this line to 1,200 tons per day.” That headroom was deliberate. Drives, extraction hydraulics and the steam system were all specified with the next expansion in mind, so raising throughput later is a matter of equipment changes rather than a rebuild.
Planning a soybean line from 100 to 2000 T/D? Tell us your capacity and raw material on WhatsApp and we will send a process configuration and budget range.
Discuss a soybean plantThe flag on the silo
Walking into the Inolsa plant, Mr. Yan saw the Chinese flag flying from the top of the silo. He later said that moment stayed with him: Chinese equipment had not only won the customer’s approval, it had earned respect for Chinese manufacturing.
It is a fair summary of what Huatai has been working toward for more than thirty years. The company is a national high-tech enterprise and an outstanding member of the Chinese Cereals and Oils Association, and it puts most of its engineering effort into three things on large complete plants: environmental performance, lower carbon intensity, and automation that lets a plant run at nameplate capacity with a small crew.
Thinking about a plant of this scale?
A 1000 T/D soybean plant is a two-year conversation, not a purchase order. It starts with your bean assay, your local steam and power costs, and what the meal needs to test at for your market. If you are at that stage, send us the basics and we will come back with a process flow, a footprint estimate and a budget range — usually within 48 hours.
Interested in a customized oil production line? Our engineering team is ready to prepare a tailored proposal for your specific requirements.