Canary Media senior reporter Maria Gallucci recently took a pretty unconventional road trip – shadowing a truck driver as he drove around New Jersey, sucking grease, beef tallow, and used cooking oil out of dumpsters behind airports and restaurant chains.
This grease will soon be turned into a sustainable aviation fuel known as hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA. With hydrogen and batteries still not ready to move our airplanes, the airline industry is relying on cooking grease to decarbonize. How clean – and how scalable – is it?
Maria Gallucci joins us to explain. You can find her feature story for Canary Media here.
Full transcript:
SPEAKERS
Stephen Lacey, Dale Brittell, Maria Gallucci
Stephen Lacey
So can you imagine the smell like right now? What is the smell of cooking grease in a dumpster like?
Maria Gallucci
It’s like french fries plus body odor, plus, cooking? Yeah, because like if you’re making food on the stove.
Dale Brittell
We call it peanut butter. It gets like peanut butter as the temperature gets cooler and cooler. It ends up being thicker and thicker like is
Maria Gallucci
that big glob down there.
Stephen Lacey
Canary Media Senior Reporter Maria Gallucci recently went on a road trip, and many of us eat greasy foods when we’re out on the road for a while but Maria went actually looking for the grease. That sound you’re hearing. It’s cooking oil getting sucked up. And pretty soon it’ll be burned in airplanes.
Maria Gallucci
Do you mind saying your name and I guess what we’re doing right now.
Dale Brittell
I’m Dale Brittell. I work for Mahoney Environmental and we’re going around collecting used cooking oil that gets refined and eventually gets turned in bulk into airline fuel.
Maria Gallucci
I read a lot about hard to decarbonize sectors, including aviation, and one topic that comes up frequently is sustainable aviation fuels. So in my reporting, I’ve just always been so fascinated by the fact that most of this sustainable aviation fuel that’s made in use today is from used cooking oil, animal fats, grease, so I tagged along with a driver named Dale Brittell, and we met up at the Newark Airport where he had – his first stop in the morning was collecting used cooking oil from the restaurants there at the airport.
Dale Brittell
Every kid wants to grow up and drive trucks. It’s fun, trust me. To get paid for something that you’re good at, and make an environmental difference, this becomes the favorite job. I mean, I’m staying till I retire, they won’t be able to get rid of me. I’ll keep coming to work every day until they say all right, that’s enough.
Stephen Lacey
Maria shadowed Dale all day on his daily route traveling to fast food restaurants, to bars, to grocery stores and they saw some pretty gnarly stuff.
Maria Gallucci
This almost looks like sand.
Dale Brittell
That’s all the crumbs that came off or chicken or fries or whatever they cooked, you can still get oil out of that. So we take it all.
Maria Gallucci
The truck has about 100-foot-long vacuum hose. So to start – when you hear the whirr and the sort of suctioning of a vacuum, like if you were cleaning a floor of an industrial facility, but then when you hit a fat pocket or get a glob of something, you kind of hear that glug as it goes into the hose. And then as you reach toward the bottom, the scraping. And it’s just like a very loud vacuum.
Dale Brittell
Never stick your hand in there.
Stephen Lacey
This fat used to be a waste product restaurants would pay people like Dale to take it off their hands. But now with the rising interest in sustainable fuels it’s like liquid gold. There’s even a black market for it. But I couldn’t help but think “is this really the best tool we have to decarbonize aviation.” So you write in this piece, when airlines talk about burning cleaner fuel, right now they’re effectively talking about the contents of a padlocked dumpster kept behind a Buffalo Wild Wings sportsbar.” So this is our current source of sustainable aviation fuel?
Maria Gallucci
Yeah, essentially, fuel producers like Nestle and others say they’re working to find out more viable alternatives but right now, this is kind of the most widely available feedstock. In most of the world, including the United States, it really highlights kind of the amount of innovation and investment and research that’s still needed to figure out how to clean up air travel. There is a really big gap between where we are now and this sort of futuristic vision that we see in these renderings and illustrations that companies are putting out.
Stephen Lacey
This is the Carbon Copy. I’m Stephen Lacey. This week, the greasy truth behind sustainable aviation fuels. With hydrogen and batteries still not ready to move our airplanes, the industry is relying on cooking grease to decarbonize. How clean and how scalable is it? Maria Gallucci joins us to explain. So I’ve been paying attention to the biofuel story for a long time since the early mid 2000s and I was very aware that grease collection was getting more valuable, getting a lot more sophisticated. But the thing that really blew my mind about this story is that this is what the airlines are relying on to decarbonize. I really had no idea that this was the primary source of drop-in fuels for airlines. Did that surprise you to when you found that out?
Maria Gallucci
It sort of surprised me in the simplicity of it, because when I cover efforts to decarbonize aviation, it’s always very high tech – you see these very slick renderings of a hydrogen powered jet or a battery-powered plane or something that looks different than the planes that are flown today. And then learning more about the source of sustainable aviation fuel today, I was kind of surprised at how sort of low tech it was. But in reporting on this, it makes a lot of sense, right? Because if you as an airline are facing a lot of pressure to clean up your operations, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that you’re producing, used cooking oil fuels already exist, they’re already produced at wide scale, albeit for the road transportation market. And so it’s something that you can tap into now, as you in theory are working to develop longer-term solutions for aviation.
Stephen Lacey
How many Dales are out there across America driving around collecting this grease?
Maria Gallucci
I don’t know how many across America but Mahoney Environmental, which is the company that Dale works for and is a subsidiary of Neste has hundreds of drivers and growing. Last year alone, they doubled their workforce, and are adding even more locations that they collect grease from.
Stephen Lacey
So once this beef tallow/cooking oil/pork fat gets collected, it gets turned into a fuel known as HEFA, which stands for hydro processed esters and fatty acids. So what happens to the oil once it gets sucked up from these restaurants? How does it actually get recycled and turned into jet fuel?
Maria Gallucci
Sure, so the oil and the grease that Dale collects goes to a central processing facility first where the impurities are removed, it’s cleaned up, and then it’s moved to a refinery, where the HEFA process – it’s energy intensive and involves the use of hydrogen – turns this feedstock into an oil that’s essentially very similar chemically to diesel, and is able to be dropped in directly to existing engines via a jet engine or truck engine. And that’s a big difference over biodiesel, which needs to be blended with petroleum products, because of its different chemical characteristics. So you can go from the vat in the kitchen of a Burger King take it to a refinery and out comes a chemical and ingredient that looks very similar to diesel.
Stephen Lacey
So what actually determines whether this grease gets turned into a biodiesel or a sustainable aviation fuel? Is it purely economics, and that the airlines are willing to pay more?
Maria Gallucci
It’s purely an economic or a market-based decision. Right now there is increasing demand for renewable diesel for trucks for this reason that you can drop it indirectly, rather than having to blend it. So there’s kind of environmental benefits to doing that. Also, you can sell more renewable diesel in and of itself if you’re not having to blend it. But with more tax credits, more incentives coming out for sustainable aviation fuel, there is an increased incentive to both make more of the fuel and also perhaps shift some production from renewable diesel to sustainable aviation fuel. Basically, wherever fuel producers can get more money for their product is where they’ll follow.
Stephen Lacey
There are a handful of refineries around the world that can turn this grease into sustainable aviation fuel, how much are they actually processing? And how much is that production ramped up in recent years?
Maria Gallucci
Globally, fuel producers made about 80 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel, which is up 200% from the amount that they produced in 2021. And it’s still a very tiny amount relative to how much petroleum-based jet fuel the aviation industry uses. It’s less than 1%. But with more refineries coming online with more production ramping up, industry estimates say that perhaps sustainable aviation fuel could equal about 10% of total jet fuel demand by 2030, which is a pretty big step up from where it is today.
Stephen Lacey
80 million gallons sounds like a lot of fuel but the big question is if this process can scale to meet the needs of the zero carbon airlines of the future. After the break, are HEFAs really the future of decarbonizing aviation, and what other technologies are out there to clean up the industry? So let’s just talk about scale here. This process is pretty straightforward. There’s a lot of infrastructure to take this cooking oil, to process it, but it just doesn’t sound like it can scale. So how much grease and cooking oil do we actually have out there that could be turned into aviation fuels?
Maria Gallucci
One estimate by the International Council on Clean Transportation is about 2%. So that if we use all of the used cooking oil and animal fats, that could account for about 2% of sustainable aviation fuel. The industry is going to need to produce billions of gallons, every year of this fuel it it’s going to replace petroleum-based jet fuel. And so even those used cooking oil is a big fraction of SAF right now, in the future, it will ultimately only be a small percentage.
Stephen Lacey
As these things always are the emissions picture I’m sure is quite complicated, and can be difficult to calculate. So what is the commonly accepted emissions impact of these greasy fuels? Like why is the math so complicated?
Maria Gallucci
So one estimate that I cited in my story is from California, which has the low carbon fuel standard and takes a close look at the emissions profiles of a lot of different fuels. They estimate that renewable diesel made from use cooking oil, which is very similar to sustainable aviation fuel has a lifecycle emissions factor of 15 to 20 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, or essentially 1/5th the CO2 footprint of petroleum-based diesel, so it is substantially less carbon intensive by that metric. But there are a lot of other factors that are kind of difficult to capture in a number like that. One of them is this idea of displacement emissions. So you have this used cooking oil, you could have used it to make food for livestock. Instead, to use it for sustainable aviation fuel. Well, now you have to go and perhaps harvest more corn and soy to make that food for the livestock and therefore you’re increasing agricultural emissions and productions. Also, if you’re using the used cooking oil to make fuel for airplanes instead of trucks, perhaps you’re just shifting the benefits, instead of creating more benefits for the climate. One of the experts I talked to said, “Well, even though it’s called a waste product, right, because the cooking oil is generated from kitchens as a waste product, that’s not truly waste, because there’s always something that could be done with it. And what you choose to do with it will kind of, and the ripple effect that has will have a big determination on what the ultimate emissions profile of that fuel is.”
Stephen Lacey
So there’s this other big question wrapped up in the use of these cooking oils, which is that their original sources, from industrial livestock production, industrial agriculture, and there’s all sorts of animal welfare and environmental questions around that industry. So how does that tie into our assessment of the value of these fuels?
Maria Gallucci
Yeah, there’s this underlying tension that the, the oils and greases and fat come from industrial agriculture, and industrial livestock production. And those in and of themselves are very emissions intensive processes. They also have big environmental impacts on water quality, air quality, animal welfare, so use cooking as a waste product. But if you take it all the way back to the beginning, there’s also this other layer to consider in terms of emissions and environmental impacts.
Stephen Lacey
So this is a small piece of decarbonization efforts in the airline industry. This is only a couple percent of actual fuel needs. So what are the airlines actually need to do beyond that? There’s potentially electrifying regional transport, there’s use of hydrogen. What are the tools that are out there, and how ready are they?
Maria Gallucci
They’re all in development, but I would say none are close to commercial scale. Startups have pretty ambitious timelines, I’d say, for when their technology will be ready. ZeroAvia was a company developing a hydrogen fuel cell battery airplanes for regional travel. They’re hoping to be able to put those into service within a few years. Fully hydrogen-powered jets that can cross the ocean, perhaps those could be ready within a few decades. And the challenge is that a lot of companies, a lot of airlines, they’re working on solutions now, they’re getting from pilot and demonstration to commercial-scale manufacturing, but it’s hard to say when that will actually translate into when we’ll actually see that as passengers ourselves.
Stephen Lacey
I’m honestly still kind of blown away by this piece. You know, you got someone like Dale Brittell from Mahoney International spending 60 hours a week collecting this stuff. And you know, the world only discards so much french fry oil and be fat, as you’ve said in the piece, and it’s not going to make up more than a couple percent of fuels. Does this feel like the aviation industry’s best path for decarbonizing right now? You know, like these technologies you identified previously, they’re decades off potentially. This feels like the only thing that’s available now and it’s really not that scalable.
Maria Gallucci
Yeah, I would say that’s accurate. There is room to scale. They haven’t captured all of the used cooking oil and animal fats. And certainly they could shift more of more of the production toward aviation and away from a ground transportation. So there are other ways of making sustainable aviation fuel that use materials like woody biomass, also called forest residues, municipal solid waste, algae, carbon dioxide that’s captured from ethanol refineries. And these are coming along in the pilot demonstration phase. A few companies are starting to build commercial-scale refineries. Those haven’t opened yet, but potentially in the next few years, we could start to see more types of sustainable aviation fuel beyond used cooking oil, and HEFA fuels that are entering the market. And so despite the limitations of used cooking oil, there could still be substantial growth of sustainable aviation fuel from other types of materials.
Stephen Lacey
So at this point, if I want to minimize my impact from flying, it seems like sustainable aviation fuels are not the solution I should be betting on right now.
Maria Gallucci
Well, I was just thinking whenever I write a story about aviation, usually I’ll get a comment or someone will reach out and say, “Well, you know, one way to reduce emissions is to fly less.” And that’s definitely true. There’s a very small percentage of people who account for the majority of the emissions from flying, and flying less is one easy and obvious way to reduce emissions. The challenge is that airlines aircraft manufacturers don’t have so many incentives to pursue that route.
Stephen Lacey
So did anyone on the train on the way home comment on your distinct french fries smell?
Maria Gallucci
I took a cab back to the New York train station and my driver goes, “oh, that’s what I thought I smelled,” when I explained to him that I’ve been driving around with a used cooking oil collector.
Stephen Lacey
Good icebreaker I guess. Maria Gallucci, senior reporter at Canary Media. Thanks so much for joining us again.
Maria Gallucci
Thanks for having me.
Stephen Lacey
And that is going to do it for the show. The Carbon Copy is a co-production of Post Script Meda and Canary Media. You can find Maria’s story at canarymedia.com, or it’s linked in the show notes. And if you want a regular newsletter, distilling all our podcasts, go to postscriptmedia.com and sign up for our newsletter. And many of those shows are produced by Alexandria Herr, who was also the producer with me on this episode. Anne Bailey is our editor and Sean Marquand is our engineer. Original music came from Echo Finch and Blue Dot Sessions. Post Script is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude is a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across advanced energy, food and agriculture, transportation, logistics, Advanced Materials, manufacturing and advanced computing. And if you feel so inclined, send a link to this show to a friend or a colleague. Hit us up on Twitter and give us a rating and review so that others can learn more about the show and we thank you so much for being here.
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