Used cooking oil to power jet engines, so fry hard
By 2027, India has been roped into blending 1% SAF for international flights, inching to 2% by 2028. Domestic flights will follow. Late arrivals are not new.INDIA NO STRANGER TO SUSTAINABLE AVIATION FUELSAF is no stranger to our headlines, even if it makes little headway. Back in August 2018, SpiceJet flew a Bombardier from Dehradun to Delhi on a 75:25 mix of aviation turbine fuel (ATF) and jatropha-based biofuel, cooked by the Indian Institute of Petroleum.In 2022, IndiGo flew with a 10% SAF blend on a ferry flight from Toulouse to Delhi. These trips are made to make headlines, followed by the kind of silence you hear after a flop Bollywood sequel.Jatropha, that weed we have idolised since childhood for its firepower, was once India's biofuel heartthrob. In the 2000s, we planted it like crazy, believing it would free us from oil imports. It did not. Yields on marginal lands were as pathetic as Raid 2, and it gobbled farmland, jacking up food prices. Now, it's a sidekick, not Shah Rukh Khan of biofuels.Ethanol has had it better because it found a guardian in Nitin Gadkari. India hit 20% ethanol blending in petrol by 2025, five years early, saving Rs 1.36 lakh crore in foreign exchange and pumping production from 38 crore litres in 2014 to 661.1 crore litres.If your scooter is whining about mileage, and your car's fuel injectors are throwing tantrums, you clearly are from the petrol lobby. Tough luck, aam aadmi, tweet your tears, but ethanol is here to stay. Buy an E-20-compliant car and see the blending go up to E-27 as declared.The government is now eyeing ethanol for SAF via the alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) pathway, aiming for 30 billion litres annually from crop waste and municipal trash. It is pricier than ATF, like Chayos chai versus roadside cutting, but who, if not you, will sustain the sugar industry by buying its byproduct?REAL PAKODA OF COOKING OIL PUZZLEadvertisementNow, the real pakoda of a puzzle: collecting used cooking oil. Where will the Panipat refinery source the crude oil to refine, in this case, used mustard oil. By door-to-door collection, like trash collected every morning? Will we have 3 coloured bins now: green, blue and yellow for the oil? Or grovelling to pakoda-walas to donate their black, tar-like treasure, reused till it's basically liquid regret? The answer, my friend, is frying in the kadhai!India could churn out 19-24 million tonnes of SAF yearly, but a 5% blending target needs 140 million litres of oil. That's a Himalayan pile of pakodas to fry. Supply chains are shakier than a cycle rickshaw on a Gurugram flyover. Villagers in Chhattisgarh and Karnataka scrounge jungles for jatropha seeds, which then hitch-hike hundreds of miles to refineries.Here's where you, proud Bharatiya naagrik, become the hero India didn't ask for. Set up a pakoda stall, and you are not just self-employed, you are a cog in the crude oil supply chain to Panipat. Fry hard, dream big! India's gunning for 8-10 million tonnes of SAF by 2040, needing Rs 6-7 lakh crore in investments to cut oil imports by $5-7 billion annually. Over 1.2 million jobs could sprout, if we ever sort out this logistical circus.advertisementSo, fuel your imagination, not disappointments. Turning your kitchen oil into jet fuel is like betting on a bullock cart to win Formula 1. If we can somehow wrangle the oily drippings from a billion samosa-holding hands, maybe, just maybe, that cart will zoom past the chequered flag. Until then, keep frying pakodas and save the planet.(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)
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