Lootah Biofuels, a company based in Dubai, UAE, is producing biodiesel from used cooking oil bringing sustainable transportation options to a major oil-producing country.
The result is a fuel that is less expensive – even in a country where petroleum products are among the cheapest anywhere in the world – as well as being renewable and clean.
The United Arab Emirates company now boasts having their own fuel outlets across the city of Dubai, delivering 60 million litres annually to residents of the desert gulf nation.
It is the brainchild of Yousif Bin Saeed Al Lootah, who wants the UAE to be the first nation in the region to mandate that biofuels be featured alongside other fuel in all public stations. Despite currently possessing some of the world’s largest oil reserves, there is an increasing appetite in Dubai, and across the region, to develop means of generating power which don’t rely on setting fire to natural resources which took millions of years to form.
They pay for the used cooking oil collected, thus giving an incentive to providers like restaurants, bakeries, and food chains, which provide 500,000 liters of waste oil every month – waste which would otherwise be clogging up drainpipes before eventually harming the natural environment.
The company says it converted the waste oil into 770 tons of biofuel last year.
The Lootah Biofuels website reports that used cooking oil has the highest carbon saving ratio amongst all the available biodiesel feedstock—and calculates that their product has caused the reduction of 500 million tons of CO2, so far.
Efforts to create a circular economy which reduces waste are gradually increasing all over the planet, with widespread popular support.
Alfonso Benitez, an Uber driver in Asuncion, said: “We need to burn the natural oil to go to Mars sometime. We don’t need to burn it to go to the supermarket every week.”
