This is an archival version of the original KnowledgePoint website.

Interactive features have been disabled and some pages and links have been removed.

Visit the new KnowledgePoint website at https://www.knowledgepoint.org.

 
0

Does anyone have any information on Waste Cooking Oil?

Ahana Shrestha
Practical Action
KnowledgePointAdmin
RedR CCDRR

Hello there, I am curious on the uses of Waste Cooking Oil (WCO) at a number of levels: a. There was a national scheme on recycling it and using it as biodiesel. This has gone a bit quite. Would you know why? b. Is there an application where I could use it for heating to substitute the natural gas I consume?


3 Answers

0
RedR TSS
RedR TSS

Hullo

Apologies for delay in responding. Your question has been passed directly to our experts and, hopefully, some answers will be posted here soon.

K/ rgds, Leigh

LC Jones RedR KP KnowledgePoint Moderator

0
Paul Kirwan
RedR

What projects are out there will depend on what country you are in.

l believe it is being done - though by companies with access to large amounts of waste oil from major users so it maybe does not make the news.

At very small scale you can buy equipment to do this yourself, though you will still need access to old cooking oil in the scale of your fuel requirement and it is a messy business to get into, the process also requires some stock chemicals and a little trial and error unless you have a sophisticated conversion set-up.

Waste cooking oil can not easily be turned into bio-gas, it is the wrong base stock for that.

0
Tony Taylor
RedR

An easy way to use wast heating oil is to burn it for heating - but of course it will depend on what sort of boiler you have... If you are able to find a heating boiler which is designed for low-grade heating oil (poor quality diesel/kerosene) then it will probably be fine to use it in that - especially if you mix it for example 50-50 with the normal fuel.

I have successfully run vehicle diesel engines (not the modern computer controlled type but the traditional all mechanical engines) on fresh vegetable oil, they are quite happy with that as long as it is kept warm enough to avoid waxing on the fuel filter. Using waste oil might be possible but you would have to filter it and probably mix it with normal diesel fuel. The only way to really know is to try it and see... the filters or the burner (in a heater system) are where you will have problems,and both are easy to change or clean out, so you don't have to take much of a risk experimenting as long as you are confident to do any post-experiment maintenance necessary...

Hope that helps

Tony