Indian Economy
Scheme for Used Cooking Oil
- 12 Aug 2019
- 3 min read
On the occasion of World Biofuel Day, the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas released the Expression of Interest (EOI) for procurement of biodiesel made from Used Cooking Oil (UCO).
- The entrepreneurs setting up biodiesel plants (using used cooking oil as their raw material) to get remunerative price and assurance of complete offtake of production by the oil companies for the purpose of blending with normal diesel.
- The Minister also launched a ‘Repurpose Used Cooking Oil (RUCO)’ sticker and a phone app to enable the collection of used cooking oil.
- Restaurants and hotels interested in supplying used cooking oil can affix the sticker to show availability.
Background
- The announcement comes just a day after the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) directed Food Safety Commissioners to ensure that Food Business Operators (FBOs), whose consumption of edible oils for frying is more than 50 litres per day, stop reusing the oil more than three times.
- FSSAI is planning to launch a mobile app for tracing and tracking used cooking oil.
- FSSAI is also planning to ask cooking oil manufacturers to come out with colour charts (either on the product or in a booklet along with the product) that will help people to identify if the oil is fresh or re-used.
- The order is aimed at ensuring that reused cooking oil is neither directly used in food preparation nor re-enters the food chain i.e. to set in safety standards in the food industry.
- When used multiple times, cooking oil becomes acidic and darkens in colour. This may alter the fatty acid composition of the oil.
Other Initiatives Taken for Boosting Production of Biofuels
- The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas is working on a four-pronged strategy in this regard -promoting Ethanol, 2-G ethanol, Compressed Biogas (CBG) and Bio-diesel.
- The ethanol blending in Petrol has gone up from 1% to about 8% and is likely to touch 10%.
- The Budget 2019-20 underlined the transformation of farmers from Annadata to Urjadata.
- The Government is planning to allow production of ethanol from surplus food grains which sometimes go waste and also entail expenditure on storage.
- The City Gas Distribution (CGD) network is being set up in over 400 districts which will give a big fillip to the use of CBG.
- Biogas is purified to remove carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide gases to prepare CBG.
- CBG has calorific value and other properties similar to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and hence can be utilized as green renewable automotive fuel.
