"... virgin oil — including palm oil, which is associated with deforestation in Southeast Asia — as if it were used. It’s hard to catch, since fresh oil spiked with a little restaurant grease is almost indistinguishable from the real thing."
Just a snippet of weirdness from the vat of weirdness that is "The used oil from your french fry order may be fueling your next flight" (WaPo)(gift link).
২২টি মন্তব্য:
Chemical congruence and the Green blight over land, sea, and air. A coincidence of reuse, reduce, and recycle in unsustainable choices for profit and cleansing ideologies.
I hope it’s certified-organic, free range grease.
They should make a Broadway show out of this story.
I support French fries made in lard. it makes the fries taste better. Lots of lard is ending up in animal food and cosmetics because someone claimed it was bad for our health. But to this day, we fry meat and eat the resulting lard with our cooked food, but we suddenly cannot use lard as a cooking oil?
The feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel may begin as something from a fryer vat but that headline is like suggesting "that coke can you recycled 10 years ago is now an integral part of the airframe of your next flight".
"Lots of lard is ending up in animal food and cosmetics"
There may be a use for Gadfly afterall.
Just remove the subsidies that make the harvesting of frying oil profitable for jet fuel. End of problem.
By the way, The Simpsons covered this problem 30 years ago.
That's if the dogs like the dog food.
I support French fries made in lard.
Beef tallow. Save the lard for pie making, it's great for a flaky pastry. Tallow also has a higher smoke point, so it's better for frying.
Too strange for fiction: The EU subsizied solar power prices, and producers put a bunch of solar farms in sunny Spain. The producers then discovered that burning fossil fuels AT NIGHT to generate 'solar' power would make a profit, so they lit the solar cells at night with big spotlights...
https://theecologist.org/2010/apr/16/spanish-nighttime-solar-energy-fraud-unlikely-uk
If fresh oil spiked with a little restaurant grease is virtually indistinguishable, why is using it wrong?
I skied at a mountain whose snow groomers (the tracked machines, not (necessarily) the personnel) worked on leftover french fry oil. The smell made me insanely hungry, probably great for the apres-ski restaurants' business.
Used cooking oil used to be considered hazardous waste and if you ran a restaurant with a grill and fryer, you'd have to contract with someone to remove it and pay them for it. About 20 years ago, everything changed, because it's ideal for making biodiesel fuel and what was once a problem to solve became a valuable commodity. It is indeed a fascinating story.
I read a short story back in the eighties about a couple of grease bandits in Texas. They were eventually waylaid by a K-9 squadron.
You can run, but you can't hide.
I was at an event about ten years ago, and there was a state inspector wiping the filler caps of every diesel powered RV he could find. He was looking for rigs using reprocessed cooking oil, instead of diesel fuel sold at pumps. Cooking oil is untaxed, and there is a hefty fine for avoiding it. Pumped diesel fuel has an additive to identify it, and cooking oil does not. For the uninitiated, diesel fuel is very close to Jet A, which is common aviation jet fuel.
If they could find a way to harvest from Gov. Newsom it would solve a couple of problems.
About 20 years ago, everything changed, because it's ideal for making biodiesel fuel
So, is this the real reason restaurants stopped using beef tallow (solid when cool) and switched to oils that they could resell?
I'm actually and expert on this. The article is mostly OK, with reasonable lay descriptions of the process. The biggest error is stating there is a new class of fuel. In operational performance terms, there is no difference. The only difference is in the regulatory area.
The aviation community looked at the problems caused by the introduction of biodiesel to diesel and ethanol to gasoline. There is just no way aviation could stand the level of operating turmoil those political impositions caused. So, we said we will take alternative sources, but the output has to be aviation grade kerosene. We have an extensive, test-driven process for determining if a proposed kerosene range component is fit-for-purpose. Jet Fuel is Jet Fuel.
Adulterating waste oil with new oil is strictly a regulatory issue, having to do with subsidies or taxes. The process to make aviation kerosene could care less.
When I was working on the DARPA program that developed the process for converting organic oils to kerosene, there were concerns about diverting food to fuel. There were places like Hawaii that has no oil supply and tons of arable but unused land. That would be a good spot. One thing that was high on our list was remediating tobacco crop land (in the '00s a total ban on smoking was under consideration). A significant amount of the tobacco plant is plowed back in the field and thus contaminated with nicotine which food crops would pick. Growing castor beans would also pull the nicotine from the ground but it is not a food crop.
We also have processes for making fuel from ethanol, so there will still be a use for all that High Fructose Corn Sugar that RFK Jr wants to ban will still have a purpose.
So, is this the real reason restaurants stopped using beef tallow (solid when cool) and switched to oils that they could resell?
No, that was more a case of the interests of the Big Ag and the FDA being in convergence.
GRW3 @ 2:08
It still has to be refined and the bonds broken. Is there a catalytic process?
For Joe Bar, KEROSENE is very close to Jet A, which is common aviation jet fuel.
(FIFY)
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