How to power a plane with leftover Chinese hot pot

There’s a ritual involved in creating the perfect Sichuan hot pot and it involves fat — lots of it. Diners first immerse slivers of meat in a spicy soup rich in molten animal tallow, then dip each morsel in a plate of vegetable oil, before finally devouring it. It’s a rich delicacy, one that produces about 12,000 tons of waste oil each month in the Chinese city of Chengdu alone. So in 2016, a startup began exporting some of that leftover restaurant grease to Europe and Singapore, where it gets recycled into fuel pure enough to fly airplanes. Responsible for around 2% of the world’s total emissions of planet-warming gases, the aviation industry is under pressure to find greener ways to power its jet engines. Several major airlines, including British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways and Delta Air Lines, have pledged to replace about 10% of their jet fuel with a sustainable alternative by 2030, and more than 50 have begun to experiment with it, but cleaner substitutes are still being developed. Waste oil from kitchens is emerging as a major source of sustainable jet fuel because it doesn’t displace food production or encourage deforestation to make way for crops. And China, with its large population and love for super-greasy hot pots, is already the largest exporter. “Our mission is to make gutter oil fly to the sky,” said Zhong Guojun, vice president of Sichuan Jinshang Environmental Technology, which is behind the project. The Chengdu-based company collects used oil, mostly from hot pot restaurants in the Sichuan capital of 16m, and removes impurities such as sodium and metal particles. Its end product is a biofuel precursor usually called industrial mixed oil, which is then packed on ships that sail east along the Yangtze River to the port of Shanghai, from where it’s exported to Neste Oyj, the world’s largest producer of sustainable aviation fuel, and to global energy giants including BP PLC and Eni SpA, to be further refined into biodiesel or jet fuel.<br/>