A Shanghai gas station is replacing diesel with cooking oil

Shanghai’s gutter oil slick rose to the surface again this week, but don’t worry, it’s not being fried into that jianbing you bought for breakfast. On Tuesday (Oct 31), a gas station in Fengxian became the first in the city to start selling biodiesel that is recycled from used cooking oil.

Selling at 5.72RMB per litre compared with 6.02RMB per litre for standard diesel, this marks the first time cooking oil has been sold on China’s fuel market.

Shanghai has been treating its gutter oil – a term used to describe illegal cooking oil that is recycled from waste – since as early as 2005, but this is the first instance that the slick has been sold as a combustible for passenger vehicles.

Shanghai recovers an average of 150 tonnes of gutter oil a day. Some of this is seized by authorities, but recycling the waste into biofuel has also provided financial incentives for restaurants, who can now sell the oil to the city’s recycling firm.

Widespread use of Shanghai’s new gutter fuel would have a positive impact on air pollution in the city. According to a Xinhua report, biodiesel reportedly produces 80 percent less nitric oxide emissions and ten percent less heavy metal substances and fine particulate matters – the nasty stuff that hangs in the air any day you can’t see the Shanghai Tower.

While not everyone in the city is jumping out of the frying pan and into the driving seat, Shanghai is taking other steps to improve its carbon footprint. Last week Tesla struck a deal with the local government to construct a factory near the city, and there are also plans in the works for a gutter oil aviation fuel refinery in neighbouring Ningbo that will be able to convert Shanghai’s leftovers into 30,000 tonnes of aviation-grade biofuel a year.

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