Used Cooking Oil (UCO) Saga
As we know, petrol, diesel, kerosene etc are all different extracts of the same underlying material – what we call “oil” when we think of the Middle East. Purify that oil to different extents, and you get different outputs, all very useful because they are all storehouses of energy that we can use for various purposes. Until I read Pranay Kotasthane’s post , I didn’t know that: “Cooking oil is used to make sustainable aviation fuel.” It gets better – we are talking of used cooking oil (UCO) here! “UCO is the oil that’s left after you have cooked food in it four or five times; thereafter, it is no longer suitable for cooking but can be used as a fuel.” What drives this trend is that the aviation industry gets brownie greenie points for being environmental friendly when it converts UCO into aviation fuel. As always, there are second- and third-order behaviors that then kick in. Malaysia, for example, subsidizes its palm oil: “Hence, the new oil's market ...