Green aviation targets driving cooking oil fraud at ‘mass scale’
By Paul Homewood
Net zero targets aimed at encouraging airlines to use so-called green aviation fuel are driving fraud “at a mass scale”, campaigners claim.
Exporters in China and Malaysia are using virgin palm oil instead of recycled cooking fat to make sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), research from lobby group Transport & Environment (T&E) suggests.
This means that rather than reducing CO2 emissions, the drive to adopt SAF may instead be driving deforestation.
SAF accounts for just 0.2pc of total jet fuel use, although the British Government has ordered UK airlines to lift that proportion to 10pc by the end of the decade.
Cooking oil forms the basis for 80pc of the world’s SAF, making old chip fat a valuable commodity.
However, unscrupulous suppliers are seeking to turn a profit by cutting out the kitchen altogether and shipping virgin palm oil to unwary refiners and airlines.
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Malaysia is the worst offender, according to T&E, as campaigners cast doubt over the country’s claims that it exports three times more used cooking oil than it collects.
Last year Britain secured almost 30pc of its SAF from oil shipped from Malaysia.
Cian Delaney, the group’s biofuels campaigner, said: “With Malaysia being one of the world’s largest palm oil producers, it would heavily indicate that used cooking oil is simply a backdoor for palm. Fraud is almost certainly happening at a mass scale.”
China also appears to be engaged in cooking oil fraud, T&E said.
While figures on the collection and export of oil appear to match, China has a large market for “gutter oil” that is illegally resold for cooking.
Taking that into account, there are “strong suspicions” that some exports include virgin vegetable oil mislabelled as waste oil.
SAF production will need to be scaled up 100 times to help airlines reach the 2030 target, according to estimates from Virgin Atlantic, providing a further spur for fraud.
Ryanair alone would need all of the used cooking oil in Europe to reach its target of making 12.5pc of flights sustainable within six years, T&E said.
Activists also fear that the illicit trade of SAF will encourage the expansion of palm oil plantations, one of the biggest drivers of deforestation in the tropics, according to T&E.
Some biofuels – such as rapeseed oil – are produced directly from crops, but mostly in temperate regions where they’re substituted for cereals already being grown.
Europe burns through 130,000 barrels of used cooking oil a day, eight times more than it generates.
China, with a population of 1.4bn people, is the primary supplier of used cooking oil, exporting more than half of its annual production.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/18/green-aviation-targets-cooking-oil-fraud-mass-scale/
It’s hard to think of a more stupid idea than this one!
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“Some biofuels – such as rapeseed oil – are produced directly from crops, but mostly in temperate regions where they’re substituted for cereals already being grown.“
Yes, rapeseed oil is biofuel, nothing else, due to the highly inflammatory acid involved. Before WW2, nobody would even think about using it in food. Only as fuel and a lubricant. Same apply to sunflower seed oil.
The [corrupt] pharmacy industry don’t mind though …
Varieties have been bred with low erucic acid, e.g. canola.
Max 2% erucic acid in canola if I remember correctly, but the same applies to rapeseed oil in the EU. The inflammatory effect is cumulative though and the fact that the oil is found in very many food products today means that it does not matter. Our bodies don’t have time to recover, so it eventually leads to blood clots. It’s not only high consumption of carbohydrates that leads to the same result …
The issue has clearly been dealt with by UK Government
https://www.food.gov.uk/research/research-projects/rapid-risk-assessment-what-is-the-long-term-risk-of-erucic-acid-to-uk-consumers-if-sunflower-oil-in-food-is-substituted-with
amiright1,
They “forgot” to mention that the closely related mustard oil is completly banned in EU for use in food production. It’s not more harmful than rapeseed oil though …
Governmental advices should not always be trusted, due to increased corruption …
One more thing – erucic acid is bad for the heart.
That is just wrong. Rapeseed oil is readily available for cooking
Employed by the food or pharma industry? That make sense …
I have never been employed in food or drugs. Availability of rapeseed Oil in UK for cooking is a simple fact, whatever your opinion of it. Sainsburys lists 7 Rapeseed Oil products online
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/groceries/food-cupboard/cooking-ingredients-and-oils/oils/rapeseed-oil/c:1019619
It’s available all over the Western world, but it doesn’t make it healthy to consume, does it? [ret]. Check out independed researches and find a completly different story!
I started to check this out after I got my second blood clot eight years ago. (The first one was nine years ago and I have never had any high carb’ consumption and always had physical active life.) The health care system wouldn’t bother to find out why I got them. To me, with a scientific and technical education, in addition with a military medical one, it didn’t make any sense.
Yes it is but that is not the point that Sasja is making, rather it is possibly better that it is not used for cooking due to its Erucic acid content.
Erucic acid is well documented as a cause of heart disease in humans and there was particular concern in the 1970s when rapeseed oils were taking over from animal fats. Back then up to 25% of rapeseed oil was Erucic acid. In response to concerns (and some legislation) growers modified crops and production processes which reduced this content level to around just 2%. As JIT points out it is known as Canola.
There is now concern that the acid’s effects are more cumulative than previously thought and also that our total consumption levels are increasing as it is being added to a vast range of processed foods.
The so called “climate science” industry rather invites dodgy research but it pales into relative insignificance compared to the extremes that the pharmaceutical/agricultural chemical industry comes out with! Excess Erucic acid and other additives in general is why I avoid processed food as much as is practically possible.
One of my older diesel Mercedes before the modern single rail ECU models ran really well on rapeseed oil, could be bought at a excellent price from one of the Asian wholesalers, reduced injector clatter too.
Needed a bit of diesel added in winter to improve starting.
But no way would I put it in my mouth!
Something very related. Back in the days, when rapeseed oil was much cheaper than diesel, younger guys in the country side used to buy pallet loads to use in their cars. This became common and the government finally realised it. After that, the grocery stores was forced to sell the oil at the same price per litre as the diesel.
What did anyone with a couple of brain cells ( that excludes automatically all our politicians and ‘experts’) expect?
And even if it was real cooking oil , what fuels did they think were use to cook with in Malaysia and China?
Brainless rubbish.
I think what the Government needs is a poacher, a fraudster who can tell them what scam can come out of their projects. They are obviously unable to see the flaws for themselves.
There have been similar issues with biodiesel for years: lessons are never learned.
“It’s hard to think of a more stupid idea than this one!“
Worry not, Paul!
GangGreen and their Uniparty supporters are working on it! I’m confident they will come up with another pearling idea any time soon!
In fact, ludicrous claims (like the MET’s brilliant “Hottest UK May Ever”) are now so common that I sometimes wonder if it has become a covert sport, like the old “Marmalade Bingo” (it had various names), where attendees at monthly Major Projects “progress” meetings got a reward (in pints) for the most ingenious way of working the word “marmalade” into their report.
Is that what Michael Bond was up to all along?
You could write a book on all the ways that crooks have used to make money from schemes like this, going way back. Any time there’s a price premium on some products people will be ready to adulterate and use substitutes. This applies to food especially. Oregano is a good example. The list is endless and the authorities are always playing catchup.
What a surprise – not. All the fraudsters cash in the on the stupidity of Net Zero – here and around the world.
Whilst I am all for using old cooking oil the idea of it as an aviation fuel is farcical
I discuss “Jet Zero” here:
https://cliscep.com/2024/04/29/jet-zero/
Thanks for your paper & the link Mr Hodgson. I had no idea we had so many UK Govnmnt “agencies” supposedly devoted to ‘de-carbonising’ transport. Pity they don’t attend to the real problems affecting the UK.
Thank you for your comment. I am afraid the agencies mentioned in my piece are merely the tip of the iceberg. The net zero project is careering out of control, and I suspect the people in charge have lost track of what is being spent on it in a myriad of ways. That is bad enough, but I fear they don’t even care.
Thanks for your reply Mr Hodgson, from which I gather the situation is even worse than I knew. Will anyone ultimately admit their liability for deliberately and needlessly ruining what is left of the UK’s economy ?.
I doubt it, but if, as seems inevitable, Labour achieves a massive majority at the forthcoming general election, and they set about “decarbonising” the Grid by 2030, I give it two years (and a lot of wasted money) before reality bites. My guess (and it can only be a guess) is that Net Zero will crash and burn once Labour seeks to accelerate it. To date they have been able to paper over the cracks, but that’s won’t be possible when they seek to go harder and faster.
I wonder if any of the UK Government “agencies” have actually achieved anything that is economically and functionally better than the solutions already working? There’s a good saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
I quite agree. But I’m expecting a substantial increase in the number of Govnmnt “Agencies” & Quangos after this July.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!
Bring back the Window Tax!
Hmm…it’s rumoured that the oncoming Labour Govt will introduce a garden tax, levied via satellite or drone pictures.
Having many years ago made my own biodiesel using used Palm oil, the “nasties” Acids, ethanols etc, not to mention the cooking involved means that there is undoubtedly a pollution / CO2 footprint that far exceeds the so called savings. Then of course its burnt which produces CO2. Why in gods name bother?
Exactly ! Allegedly removing CO2 in order to produce CO2. Sheer lunacy.
The real reason for the fraud is the double counting boondoggle. Typical EU numpties allow used oil, as opposed to virgin oil, to be double counted. i.e if you have to include 7% in the fuel ( say biodiesel) then you can get away with 3.5% with UCO. So the crooks dump a small amount of used oil into virgin oil and label it as used. The Chinese are the biggest exports of UCO. Its being going on for years and we are all paying the price at the pump, or soon to be air ticket prices. HVO biofuel, diesel and SAF are going to wreak havoc on the environment.
I find it quite disturbing that the MSM is only just cottoning on to the palm oil con. Anyody remember the concerted campaign to boycott palm oil products about a decade ago?
When big brand names like the heavenly Nutella came under fire for destroying the rainforest/causing climate change and we were blackmailed with pictures of starving orangutans fighting off bulldozers and told that we were killing them biscuit-by-biscuit?
Virtue signalling en masse by corporate confectioners adding ‘does not contain palm oil’ to their products – and almost certainly not to save the rainforest or its denizens, but because palm oil as an ingredient had become prohibitively expensive in the wake of the ‘green’ demand for biodiesel….
If only we had an alternative cheap, reliable, far less destructive and readily available source of fuel, eh?
CK
Is it really fraud? Are the end users bothered about where their fuel comes from as long as they can tick the right boxes on the forms of the government morons? The big fraud is that the use of these fuels will save the planet from an imaginary crisis and raise the cost of living for ordinary people for no good reason.
Anyway, on to brighter news – battery car maker Fisker has filed for bankruptcy and a good post on blackout.news shows the havoc battery cars are creating for the car hire industry. The plummeting value of their battery car assets is hitting the valuation of the companies while only virtue-signallers want to hire battery cars as who would want the stress of trying to charge your battery car in a foreign country when it is hard enough at home.
Ethanol in petrol is just as stupid. The fertiliser, the fermentation and then the energy needed to distill are all carbon dioxide producers, so it is not worth all the effort, just use petrol and eat the corn. In fact corn plants are pretty inefficient in converting sunlight into starch, so it would make more sense to install solar panels on the land used for corn. The greens are totally ignorant about reality.
Ethanol in petrol is farming mid-western US for votes.
It makes no sense otherwise.
Mass hysteria . CO2 does not warm the atmosphere. How can we get this into the heads of politicians and do-gooders, when all the ‘scientists’ whose living depend on it, can’t recant?
K. This may be the stupidest thing Gamecock ever read.
SAF is NOT used cooking oil. It is many things, even used cooking oil. Most biofuels can be SAF.
No shit, Sherlock.
Well, no, palm oil is SAF eligible biofuel. Where on earth did Jasper get the idea that you had to fry fish and chips in it to make it SAF? Dumbass.
Homer Simpson had the right idea ….. grease recycling
(993) Homer And Bart Sell Grease – Bart Skips School – The Simpsons – YouTube
it doesn’t take long for inventive types to game any system. And there is so much opportunity in the Net Zero nonsense – even Government sponsored scams like wind, solar, biomass, hydrogen.
Exporters in China and Malaysia are using virgin palm oil instead of recycled cooking fat to make sustainable aviation fuel (SAF)
Gives Virgin Atlantic a new meaning.
Good reply but never having met a virgin I wouldn’t know. Do they smell of chips or boondoggles ?.
It is all rather bad news for restaurants in China of a certain standard. Some of them formerly obtained their cooking oil by “dumpster diving” in the middle of the night, thus obtaining used cooking oil from slightly tonier places. (I am not kidding – there are videos). So perhaps it is good news for the patrons of these “enterprising” establishments – unless the restaurants switch to using discarded engine oil, of course.
There was a sobering, anti-war film, Fires on the Plain (1959), which depicted a ruined Japanese army retreating in constant rain. The camera in one sequence focused on abandoned, worn out boots, on a trail. A soldier shuffled up to them with worse boots and wearily discarded these for the ones he saw; then another soldier came with even worse boots and did a similar exchange; and so on, until a soldier with naked feet ended this particular chain of misery. Ever since I saw this film, many decades ago, the phrase “recycling” has not filled me with joy. It is embarrassing that we are being forced into a similar, desperate, approach to life, by mad people with more boots than they know what to do with.