This work reports a kinetic study of monoacylglycerols production from olive oil in a solvent-free system using a commercial lipase in the presence of surfactant. For this purpose, a commercial immobilized lipase (Novozym 435) was employed as catalyst and sodium (bis-2-ethylhexyl) suffosuccinate (Aerosol-OT or AOT) as surfactant. The experiments were performed in batch mode, recording the reaction kinetics over temperature range of 40-80 degrees C, enzyme concentration of 1-10 wt %, AOT addition of 5-20 wt %, and glycerol to oil molar ratio of 1:1-1:3. Results showed that lipase-catalyzed glycerolysis in a solvent-free system with the addition of AOT surfactant might be a promising route, as high reaction conversions to monoacylglycerols, greater than 70%, were achieved at mild temperatures and relatively low enzyme concentrations (similar to 5-7.5 wt %) in short reaction times (1 h).