From Kitchen to Combustion: How Used Cooking Oil Plays a Significant Role in Renewable Fuels Production
As part of the energy transition journey, there is a global push to prioritize the production of renewable energy sources in the fight against climate change. One solution that is propelling this transition forward is the transformation of waste and residue materials such as used cooking oil (UCO) into renewable fuels including sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel (RD). This not only reduces waste but also creates an alternative, drop-in solution to fossil fuels, enabling heavy-duty industries to also reduce reliance on fossil fuels and help fight climate change.
The Journey of Used Cooking Oil to Renewable Fuels
The journey of UCO begins in restaurant kitchens where it’s used to make the fries and crispy treats people enjoy. After serving its primary purpose, the UCO can often end up as waste. However, this waste is a valuable resource for producing renewable products.
To prevent waste, recycling is preferable as it helps conserve resources, reduces landfill debris and can even generate revenue for restaurants. However, collection of UCO is not without its challenges – the infrastructure for efficiently collecting UCO is still being developed. Additionally, UCO has recently become a focus for theft. Thieves nationwide are targeting restaurant storage containers and siphoning off grease to sell for profit. These incidents highlight the importance of secure storage and disposal practices for UCO in restaurants. By partnering with reputable recycling services like Mahoney Environmental, a subsidiary for Neste, restaurants can transform their waste into a legitimate revenue stream while contributing to environmental sustainability efforts.
Once collected, UCO is prepared for pretreatment. With the impurities removed from the UCO, it is transported to a refinery where renewable fuel producers, like Neste, turn the UCO into SAF and RD. This happens through hydrotreating, which transforms UCO into renewable fuels by using hydrogen gas as a catalyst to remove oxygen from the oil, resulting in hydrocarbons that are chemically similar to traditional fossil fuel. Because of this, renewable fuels can be used directly without modification.
Environmental and Economic Benefits of Leveraging UCO
There are a variety of benefits with converting UCO into renewable fuels, but the most important one is that UCO helps lower the carbon footprint associated with fuel production and its use. Using renewable fuels that are produced from raw materials like UCO can result in significantly less greenhouse gasses compared to using fossil fuels – this is because renewable fuels are produced by utilizing the already existing carbon stored in the renewable raw materials in nature. So when the fuel is combusted, the carbon dioxide it emits is not considered as adding new carbon to the atmosphere. The use of fossil diesel, on the contrary, releases new carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, contributing to climate change. Other emissions, such as fine particulates and nitrogen oxides (NOx) may also be reduced through the use of renewable diesel, which can lead to an improved local air quality.
Economically, the UCO collection and refinement industry creates jobs in collection, transportation, and processing. Businesses and consumers benefit from lower waste disposal costs and potential revenue from selling UCO. For example, the City of Oakland collected UCO in partnership with Neste back in 2019. In the first three months of the program, 750,000 pounds of UCO were collected and turned into renewable fuel to power the city’ municipal fleets, creating extra revenue for local businesses. Today, through Mahoney Environmental, Neste has access to UCO from over 90,000 locations across the US.
The Future of UCO
Technological advancements continue to improve the efficiency and scalability of recycling UCO. Innovations in process optimization and waste management can help enhance the viability of renewable fuels further as their demand grows, driven by environmental regulations and increasing consumer demand for more sustainable products. This raw material will continue to play an important role in the transition to renewable energy – report estimates the availability of waste and residue oils and fats globally – which can be used to produce renewable solutions SAF, can reach 40 million tons per year, this is enough to ramp up renewable fuels production in the short-term.
As more investors, employees and customers demand action on climate change, businesses can consider using waste as a resource and contribute to a system that offers a simple, cost-effective way to recycle UCO. Any business, city, or other entity that generates waste – like airports, hotels, corporate offices, movie theaters, restaurants, universities, and stadiums – can all play a part in helping fight climate change by collecting UCO so renewable fuels producers can use it to create products that fuel our transportation system.
—Peter Zonneveld is president of Neste US, a Houston, Texas-based sustainable and renewable fuels company.