Dear Editor,We wish to reply to the comments made on our paper‘‘Performance of nanofiltration membranes for solventpurification in the oil industry’’, by S. Darvishmanesh,T. Robberecht, J. Degre¨ve, and B. Van der Bruggen andpublished in J Am Oil Chem Soc 88, 1255–1261 (2011) [1]by Albert Dijkstra [2]. We are very pleased that the paperinvoked discussion, which should be the objective of allscientific research. Nevertheless, it is clear that the dis-cussion in the letter to the editor by Albert Dijkstra is rathersubjective and based on a difference in opinion arisingfrom his experience in the oil industry in comparison withthe paper’s objectives.He raised the issue of energy consumption. We claimedthat conventional solvent recovery by distillation consumesabout 50% of the total energy in edible oil extraction. In ourpaper, we stated that nanofiltration requires much lessenergy than distillation. Dijkstra believes that we overesti-mated the energy savings because most of this energy issupplied by the vapors leaving the desolventizer/toaster andthus there is little net energy saving. This may be true but isnot relevant to our study, in which a comparison of tech-nologies is made without taking into account the overallenergy balance. His comment assumes that part of the heatthat is supplied is waste heat and should therefore not betaken into account, or in other words, to paraphrase GeorgeOrwell (in his book Animal Farm) with some adaptation, allenergy is equal but some energy is less equal than the rest.The analysis ignores the efforts currently being made onusage of waste heat, which may turn waste heat into avaluable resource. Moreover, technologies become avail-able that produce significantly less waste heat so that thisheat may not be available for distillation in a later stage. Inview of this trend, it seems inappropriate to make a dif-ference between different sources of energy. This is also amatter of opinion, but it cannot be denied that utilizing lowgrade thermal energy is more and more necessary [3].However, the proposal of membrane filtration as analternative for distillation is indeed not optimal. A com-bination of membrane filtration and distillation as analternative for the combination of a desolventizer/toasterand classical distillation might be even more advantageousand should be investigated, in view of suggested advanta-ges of hybrid processes [4].Regarding the use of isopropanol, it is not at allstraightforward to consider a heating and cooling cyclemore energy efficient than a pressurization and depressur-ization cycle. Much depends on the way these technologiesare implemented. A heating and cooling cycle can beoperated most efficiently by integrating heat pump tech-nology. Yet it is not at all clear this is technically feasibleor economically viable. Moreover, the application of heatpump technology in industry is mostly an emerging field[5]. On the contrary, a pressure recovery device can beused to recover the applied pressure during nanofiltration.These devices are applied on a large scale in membraneprocesses and are known to significantly reduce energyconsumption of pressure driven membrane processes. Theliterature suggests that a reduction in operating costs andenergy consumption up to 50% can be reached by using apressure exchanger as energy recovery device [6].Dijkstra disagrees with our statement that edible oilproducers are more interested in alternative solvents less