Recent news items indicate renewed enthusiasm in investments in biodiesel, especially biodiesel from used cooking oil. While on paper there is potential to produce about 1 million tons of biodiesel a year from UCO, this has faced significant bottlenecks in real life mainly owing to the logistical challenges, in addition to the cooking oil use challenge in many outlets.
On logistics, it can easily seen why collecting a few tens of liters of cooking oil from thousands of establishments every day may not work from an economics points of view.
On the supply side, when it comes to usage patterns of used cooking oil, except for very well established users such as the star hotels that have strict norms concerning these, food safety norms established by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), never get implemented in letter and spirit.
Our research in this sector a few years back very clearly showed that something had to change drastically for the UCO to biodiesel opportunity to scale even at a city level, leave alone statewide or nationwide.
