Innovating canola crushing: Unlocking the future of canola production in North America

The challenge isn’t a lack of feedstock. Canada is on target to produce record volumes of canola this year. The constraint is the capacity that can be delivered predictably. We’re struggling to finance, build, expand, and operate facilities without introducing unnecessary risk. Too often, value is lost when owners must export raw canola for processing elsewhere. Other challenges: When projects struggle with cost escalation, long lead times, and designs that can’t adapt once construction begins.

Simply building more plants isn’t the answer. From the start, we need to rethink how we design, deliver, and operate canola crushing facilities.

So, what does it take to deliver canola crushing capacity that is predictable, scalable, and future‑ready—not just on paper but in the field? From an engineering standpoint, it comes down to these three things:

• Designing for cost, schedule, and value certainty. And doing it from day one.
• Using proven global technologies that reduce execution risk, not add to it.
• Building plants in a way that acknowledges how they will be constructed, expanded, and operated.

Below, I’ll break down the approaches helping owners build smarter facilities and capture more value across the full canola value chain.

Certainty and circular value in canola crushing

For canola plant owners, project success depends on certainty and circular value. Clear costs, reliable schedules, and stronger value capture across oil and meal streams make projects easier to finance and faster to deliver. They also improve long-term returns for owners and investors.

Certainty is improved when facilities are designed with a mindset that puts the focus on a circular economy. We shouldn’t treat canola as an oil-only process with secondary streams that are managed later. Instead, we need to engineer oil, meal, utilities, byproducts, and logistics as one integrated system. This approach reduces risk, improves efficiency, and helps owners compete globally.

A dollar should stay a dollar, and a 12-month schedule should mean 12 months. That reliability makes it easier to secure financing and offtake agreements across food, feed, and fuel markets—and helps projects move from ideas to construction faster.

Achieving this level of certainty can be challenging because only two main technology providers dominate the market. That scarcity can drive up costs, constrain schedules, and create risk during planning. Owners want partners who can reduce uncertainty by integrating decisions across the entire project life cycle.

Cost certainty also improves when canola crushing is approached through a circular-economy lens. Beyond oil, the processing produces canola meal, a high-protein byproduct used worldwide to feed livestock and fish. According to the Canola Council of Canada, research shows canola meal increases milk production by one liter per cow per day compared to other protein sources. While drying canola meal can require a large initial investment, the long-term benefits and untapped global markets make it worthwhile.

When projects move forward in isolation, owners often miss chances to create value across the full system. An integrated approach changes that. By designing facilities that connect oil and meal systems, owners can lower costs, unlock new value streams, and build operations that run more efficiently over time.

Facilities designed with circular value in mind perform better financially and help owners get more from every tonne of canola—today and in the long term.

Advancing canola crushing and processing with global technologies

In my experience, canola crushing growth in North America isn’t limited by demand; it’s limited by confidence in delivery. And that comes down to policy support, access to federal funding programs, and a clear path to predictable project delivery. In Canada, recent federal incentive programs are helping strengthen the business case for new investment. But owners still need smarter delivery approaches to scale quickly.

In other regions, particularly in parts of Eastern Europe, plants are engineered with expansion and uptime in mind from the outset. With modular, upgrade‑ready processing lines, the plant can add capacity with shorter outages and less disruption. In some cases, that approach has reduced processing time per ton from 8 hours to 5. It has also lowered annual maintenance costs by up to 35 percent and improved return on investment timelines.

The takeaway isn’t that owners should copy Eastern Europe. It’s that we can apply the same principles—including a modular and standard approach, along with upgrade-ready design—to projects in Canada and the US.

For owners looking to build or expand today, the opportunity is clear. Design plants with future phases in mind. Prioritize scopes that can be fabricated and tested off-site. Build repeatable layouts wherever possible. And invest in systems that optimize the full value chain, not just oil yield but also the recovery and reuse of byproducts like canola meal and wastewater.

If owners approach next-generation crushing plants this way, they can achieve:

• Faster delivery.
• Lower lifecycle costs.
• More resilient operations. And ones that adapt to changing demand.

In many operations, byproduct streams are too often treated as waste. In other parts of the world, they are viewed as valuable resources—refined into new products and more revenue. Shifting to that mindset changes the industry. It sets the industry up for better financial performance and long-term sustainability. By combining the right technologies with a circular, big-picture approach, owners can improve efficiency across the entire operation and get more value from it.

Leveraging technologies to modernize canola crushing

One of the exciting trends I see in industrial sectors is a move to connected, adaptive plants—or what are often called “swing plants.” In simple terms, these are facilities designed to share data, balance loads, and respond dynamically when conditions change.

If you’re reading this with your morning coffee, imagine it this way. There is a coffee-processing operation where they are prepared for difficulties. If one plant goes offline, another automatically picks up the slack. That way, production keeps moving, and revenue is protected. And you get your coffee.

That concept can work for canola crushing, too.

The industry is turning to financial incentives and AI‑enabled tools to improve cost and schedule certainty. By combining artificial intelligence, sensor networks, and real‑time data, plants can share capacity, increase output, and respond faster as demand shifts.

For operators, the value goes beyond efficiency. These tools help protect revenue, cut downtime, and get more from both oil and meal production. This is a market with tight margins and schedules. So, connected, data‑driven systems can deliver a clear competitive advantage.

Our role as engineers is to review proven technologies from around the world and assess how to adapt them for North American projects without losing quality. This mix of global insight and industrial project experience helps operators put proven solutions in place. These solutions can improve efficiency, increase value from oil and byproducts, and lower operational risk. This means modern canola crushing investments do more than upgrade equipment. Instead, they create stable, high-performing plants that are:

• Easier to operate
• More competitive
• Better positioned for new market opportunities

Modular design: Smarter, faster, safer

Beyond just choices in technology, we need to look at the way canola crushing plants are built. And, honestly, it must change. Owners are demanding more cost and schedule predictability, and investment decisions depend on it.

When we embed the construction strategy in the design, outcomes improve. Too often, projects are designed first and “figured out” in the field later. That approach drives rework, delays, and cost escalation. That’s the benefit of an Early Contractor Initiative approach. As the designer, early alignment occurs in detailed design with an owner-engaged contractor. This helps us define how the plant will be constructed, which leads to a better facility.

Key questions are addressed early:

• What scopes can be modularized?
• What can be fabricated and tested off-site?
• What can be transported and installed using a “plug-and-play” approach?
• What can we standardize into repeatable layouts to reduce complexity?

The more that is shifted off-site, the more predictable the project becomes. It cuts on-site construction time and reduces exposure to weather delays. It also improves safety and increases overall efficiency. From my experience, projects delivered through this approach are becoming far more consistent—especially when it comes to cost certainty and schedule compliance.  

My team is also developing templated plant designs and frameworks that can be adapted and customized for each client. This results in faster execution, more accurate cost estimates, and greater value. Just 10 years ago, this type of study could take 10-plus months to complete. Today, it can be delivered in closer to 2 months by using repeatable design approaches and improved execution planning. Working closely with construction partners allows us to refine cost models and explore delivery approaches that give plant owners greater certainty and control.

Driving innovation in canola crushing

The canola industry is at a turning point. Demand for sustainable oils and renewable fuels is increasing faster than the infrastructure designed to process them. Moving forward will require innovation not only in crushing technology but also in how we design, deliver, and operate the facilities.

By looking at the full value chain, from oil to meal to byproducts, owners can reduce risk, improve economics, and build facilities that are resilient in a volatile market.

Owners already have feedstock, the expertise, and the market access. What matters now is how to efficiently and reliably capture that value.

The next generation of canola crushing plants can function differently. With the right mix of modular design, proven technology, and disciplined engineering, we can build them faster, operate them more reliably, and position them for long‑term success.