California restaurants are hurting. That means less leftover cooking oil to make biofuels





In pre-pandemic times, Bay Area fast-food chain Super Duper Burgers placed a 50-gallon container in every restaurant to store used cooking oil.

The containers would fill up every two weeks and were collected by SeQuential, a biodiesel producer in Portland, Ore.

Then restaurants experienced drastic cutbacks in March, and the containers took much longer to fill up.

"We eventually brought it back to every two weeks once business began to improve, but I'm not sure yet how it's gonna be because of the (new) lockdown," said Ed Onas, Super Duper's vice president of operations, who noted that the chain has downsized from 15 locations to 13.

As Super Duper's experience suggests, the economic upheaval wrought by the coronavirus has had a knock-on effect on the biofuels industry. Production plants for biofuels, which California promotes as greener than ordinary diesel or gasoline, often rely on restaurants, factories and other sources that regularly generate used cooking grease. Refineries can turn this into renewable diesel or biodiesel to fill trucks, ships, school buses and more.

Biofuels leaders say that the supply of used cooking oil in recent months has run far below the comparable time period in 2019.

"Back in the spring, what was being collected and coming through went down to about 20%," said Joe Gershen, president of Encore BioRenewables, a Santa Monica consulting company that works with biofuel producers. "So that's like an 80% decrease, and we're hopeful that it won't go down to that again, but I think everyone's bracing themselves for something along those lines with these new restrictions."

Tyson Keever, chief operations officer of SeQuential, the biodiesel production company that serves California, said the sheer number of restaurant closures on the West Coast has had an impact. It's mostly restaurants that supply the oil because of their use of fryers, he said — but other institutions such as sports stadiums, schools, hospitals, business centers, malls and even government entities sometimes do so, too.

Much more idiocy!
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/California-restaurants-are-hurting-That-means-15796514.php