Revealed: The staggering volume of cooking oil poured into car tanks every day

Policymakers urged to stop practice in order to help avert ‘growing global food catastrophe’, Andy Gregory reports

A combine harvests rye at a field near Mahlow (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Despite its soaring cost and harmful climate impact, people in the UK and Europe are continuing to power their vehicles with cooking oil to the tune of millions of bottles every day, new analysis finds.

As food price inflation pushes millions around the world into poverty, cooking oils are calculated to have become two-and-a-half times more expensive than in 2020, with Russia’s war on Ukraine choking global supplies.

Yet in spite of this, some 18 per cent of the world’s vegetable oil – nearly all of which is fit for human consumption – is used for biodiesel, according to a new report by the campaign group Transport & Environment.

Over the past five years, Europe alone has burned more than 17,000 tonnes of rapeseed and sunflower oil for road transport every day – the equivalent of nearly 19 million bottles.

This means that some 58 per cent of all rapeseed oil and 9 per cent of the sunflower oil consumed in the continent is burned in cars and lorries, in addition to 50 per cent of palm oil and 32 per cent of the soy oil consumed in the EU, the analysis found.

Even prior to Vladimir Putin’s war on the “breadbasket of Europe” and his grain blockade in the Black Sea, this use of nourishing oils for fuel had contributed to a situation in which vegetable oils were showing some of the highest price increases among all food products globally, according to Transport & Environment.

And in March, the group found that Europeans were burning 10,000 tonnes of wheat – the equivalent of 15 million loaves of bread – in road vehicles every day, piling pressure on countries such as Egypt which are heavily reliant on imports.

The situation has been made even worse in recent weeks by governments across the world imposing export restrictions on key food crops, the group warned, pointing to Indonesia’s temporary ban on exports of palm oil, put in place to stabilise domestic prices.

Maik Marahrens, a campaigner with the group, said: “Every year we burn millions of tonnes of wheat and other vital grains to power our cars. This is unacceptable in the face of a global food crisis.”

“European governments have used ‘green’ fuel laws to artificially push up demand for crop biofuels,” he added. “They therefore have the instruments at hand to stop this. Policymakers should end support for food crop biofuels now and help to avoid a growing global food catastrophe.”

The EU currently promotes crop biofuels in its green fuels law – the Renewable Energy Directive – a policy which Transport & Environment has previously described as “the dumbest thing the EU has done in the name of the climate”.

The current EU cap for crop biofuels is set at 2020 levels, with a maximum of 7 per cent. Support for palm-based biofuels are set to end by 2030, but the group has called on policymakers to end support for all crop biofuels now.

A separate study from the Green Alliance found this week that, if the foreign land used to grow the UK’s bioethanol were instead used to grow food, it would be enough to feed an additional 3.5 million people each year.

While it was estimated that this alone would lower the impact of the war in Ukraine on globalundernourishment by 25 to 40 per cent, Green Alliance found that, if the UK, EU and US halved their collective use of crop-based biofuels, sufficient grain would be freed up to replace all the grain previously exported from Ukraine – which fed some 125 million people globally.

And a report commissioned by the UK government found in 2017 that the lifecycle emissions of some biofuels can be even worse than fossil fuels, with their production sometimes resulting in deforestation or the drainage of peatlands.

Starting from Sunday, G7 leaders will be meeting in Germany to discuss, among other issues, global food security.