Can used cooking oil really decarbonize the aviation industry?

On The Carbon Copy podcast this week:

Canary Media senior reporter Maria Gallucci recently took a pretty unconventional road trip: shadowing a truck driver as he drove around New Jersey, sucking grease, beef tallow and used cooking oil out of dumpsters behind airports and chain restaurants. 

This grease will soon be turned into a type of sustainable aviation fuel known as hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA. With hydrogen and batteries still not ready to move our airplanes, the airline industry is relying on cooking grease to decarbonize. How clean — and how scalable — is it? And is the future of sustainable aviation really hidden in, as Gallucci writes, ​“the contents of a padlocked dumpster kept behind a Buffalo Wild Wings sports bar”?

Maria Gallucci joins us to explain. You can find her feature story for Canary media here.

Transcript available here.

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