How everyday cooking oil is helping Japan fight an aviation fuel crisis

Japanese homemaker Maki Watanabe carefully ⁠pours into a plastic bottle the oil she used to cook her ⁠deep-fried aubergines, doing her part in her Tokyo…

Japanese homemaker Maki Watanabe carefully ⁠pours into a plastic bottle the oil she used to cook her ⁠deep-fried aubergines, doing her part in her Tokyo kitchen for a national effort to ramp up production of eco-friendly jet fuel.

“It would take a tremendous amount to make an aircraft fly, so I hope we can collect more,” said Watanabe, whose penchant for cooking allows her to donate about 40 litres (10 gallons) a year.

Her contribution is pooled at a nearby supermarket that is among roughly 300 participants in a public-private project dubbed “Fry to Fly”, as the Iran war squeezes energy supply and raises costs for ‌the resource-poor country.

Japan is looking to consumers like Watanabe with more urgency than ever as it scrambles to reach a goal of procuring a tenth of airline fuel from sustainable sources by 2030.

The world’s fourth-biggest economy estimates it needs about 1.7 million kilolitres in 2030, and hopes to gain as much as it can domestically through used cooking oil, a relatively cheap feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

But scarce feedstock and lack of infrastructure have limited domestic output of SAF to just 30,000 kilolitres now, or 0.3 per cent of total jet fuel use.

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