Techno-spatial assessment of waste cooking oil for biodiesel production in Pakistan

This study presents a take on employing the principles of waste valorization to solve the long-standing problem of finding sustainable resources for biodiesel production. The biodiesel production has always met with a competition with food security and land use. This has limited the scope of the technology to laboratory experiments only. This study aims to assess the geospatial availability of waste cooking oil in Pakistan to map its biodiesel production potential. Owing to the resource posing no land use or food security challenges, a resource assessment using geographical information systems was carried out. The waste cooking oil availability was estimated using the statistics on per capita edible oil consumption with a realistic consumption and collection factor applied to it. The available residual cooking oil was subjected to the transesterification with a rather conservative conversion to the biodiesel at 66.25% to keep the estimates realistic. The study results in heat maps of all the different regions and provinces of the country. The findings suggest that Punjab province is the highest potential province with 249,260 tonnes of biodiesel production annually. Karachi district is the highest potential district with a potential of 36,156 tonnes of biodiesel production in a year. The study paves ways for investment sector in the study area to identify highest potential regions to invest in. It also motivates the scientific community to step outside of experimental research on waste cooking oil's biodiesel production potential and perform resource assessments and techno- economic analyses on the technology for its widespread adoption. Graphic abstract PS-The callouts do not represent any geographical locations instead they represent the shade of the gradient they correspond to in terms of red being the gradient shade for the problems and the green being the gradient shade for the remedial contributions made by the study. The use of the map of the study area is because of the contextual important of the map in a resource and potential assessment that is geospatial in nature. [GRAPHICS] .