UAE & McDonalds Developing Cooking Oil Biodiesel
It is 11am in Dubai and already 42 degrees Celsius outside. Inside the warehouse it is barely any cooler.
Although workplaces in the United Arab Emirates are normally fitted with air conditioning, here they have purposefully restricted it to the offices.
“It’s the chemical reactions,” Karl Feilder, chairman of Neutral Fuels explains.
“They happen at 65 degrees so by keeping the factory temperature higher we expend less energy on the process.
“That makes it more efficient. That’s better for the environment and it cuts costs.”
He is pointing at the thirty metre long collection of industrial tanks and pipes through which the firm’s main product is being made.
The room smells a bit like a chip shop. There is a reason for that.
They are making biodiesel - converting vegetable oil from local McDonald’s restaurants so that it can be used to fuel trucks.
The biodiesel they produce can be used by any normal diesel engine. That makes it distinct from less processed vegetable and waste oils, which can only be used by converted engines.