Soon, your car will run on used cooking oil

Used cooking oil may fuel your car soon. The government has taken a clue from United States and Europe, where 75 % of used cooking oil is recycled to produce bio-diesel, and decided to have a similar frame-work for Indian eateries. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Mar 11, 2013, 24:47:24 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Used cooking oil may fuel your car soon.

The government has taken a clue from United States and Europe, where 75 % of used cooking oil is recycled to produce bio-diesel, and decided to have a similar frame-work for Indian eateries.

As the first step in this direction, the ministry of new and renewable energy has asked the National Food Safety and Standard Authority (NFSSA) to prescribe standards and regulations for use of cooking oils.

India does not have any standard prescribing till when the cooking oil can be reused. It, thereby, prevents government agencies from taking penal action against eateries reusing bad quality cooking oil, which can be harmful for one’s health.

“Food cooked in oil reused has adverse impact on one’s health,” a senior government official said. But, the same oil can becoming environment friendly if re-processed and converted into bio-diesel. “Around 28 % of the European logistics trucks run on biodiesel,” the official said.

India can do the same provided the government sets up a mechanism for collecting the used cooking oil and refineries for converting it into bio-diesel. “Work has already started on achieving this ambitious target,” the official said.

The ministry has asked Punjab based Sardar Swaran Singh National Institute of Renewable Energy to develop a system for converting used cooking oil into bio-diesel and then test it on vehicles on experimental basis. The data collected would be employed for developing a long-term national policy, the official said.

The National Biofuels Policy has envisaged a target of 20% blending of petrol and diesel with ethanol and biodiesel by 2017 from the present 5% level. Achieving the target will not be easy considering constraints on availability of basic raw material.

Around five million kilo litres of vegetable oil will be required to produce adequate biodiesel. That would be difficult unless the government decides to divert some of the edible oil seeds for biodiesel. It will not be feasible considering its political implications. As an alternative, the government sees an opportunity is used cooking oil and wants to kick-start pilots in this regard.

Once the authority comes out with the standards, the government will start pilots in select cities to collect used cooking oil from large hotels and food industry for production of bio-diesel.

If the pilots work, the government believes more than a million kilo-litres of bio-diesel can be produced from used cooking oils. “Biodiesel has been produced from used common edible oils such as rice bran, soya bean, palm and sunflower oil,” the official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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