One outback Queensland town has tongues wagging with an inventive solution to combat high fuel prices — and it smells like hot chips.
At the back of the Red Door Cafe in Cloncurry, in the state's north-west, dozens of barrels of deep fryer oil sit next to a set of industrial vehicles.
The cafe is a social enterprise that trains and employs young people at its restaurant and adjoining warehouse.
Running the organisation isn't cheap, there's forklifts to fill with diesel and generators to power.
So managers did some research and discovered that the deep fryer oil they used in the cafe kitchen could be transformed into their version of liquid gold — biodiesel.
"We had some of the oil from the cafe leftover and we weren't sure what to do with it," Red Door's Paul Bashford said.
"It took us a period of trial and error for six months or so."
Eventually, the team set up a system to convert the canola oil into biofuel.
"Essentially we're just filtering all of the solids out of the oil and then we're de-watering it," Mr Bashford said.
"We've set up quite a lot of settling tanks so that process can happen naturally and then at the end we treat it to make sure there's nothing organic growing in there."
As the biofuel is thicker than average diesel and petrol products, the team runs it in their equipment at a 50:50 ratio combined with diesel fuel.
Mr Bashford estimated the set-up, and the trial-and-error phase, cost the business a few thousand dollars.
But the money they're saving as a result is well worth it.
"At the moment, with the price of diesel, [we're] probably [saving] a fair bit," he said.
"We've saved at least 50 per cent of our fuel bill and we do have other people who are interested in purchasing the finished product off us."
Saving other businesses
The biofuel isn't just cutting costs for the Red Door.
Businesses around town now have somewhere to dump their oil waste instead of paying to have it trucked away.
Cloncurry's Central Hotel owner Lors Chandler used to freight the hotel's 40 litres of oil waste 120 kilometres to Mount Isa each week.
"Any used cooking oil is regulated waste so we had a lot of problems trying to dispose of that," she said.
"In Cloncurry, there is nowhere, I know for a long time, people were taking it to the dump, which is just an environmental hazard.
"It's a big expense and it's a big inconvenience, pods of oil sitting around, you don't have the space for it.
"Any expense at the moment is a burden … ultimately you'd have to pass that on in some way to your customer," she said.
Opportunity to decarbonise
In Australia, 32 billion litres of diesel is used annually.
With just three biofuel refineries across the country, holding a combined 100 million litres of the product, the current industry is barely making a dent on consumption.
The industry wants to see investment from federal and state governments to grow the sector.
Future Fuels manager said Simon Roycroft said Australia was missing out on an opportunity to easily generate low-carbon power.
"Look at North America, particularly the United States — that industry has flourished, it has a number of government policies in place, incentives, subsidies, to be able to assist that industry growth," Mr Roycroft said.
The European Union biofuel market routinely purchases Australian canola oil to transform into biofuels.
"While we acknowledge electrical vehicles and hydrogen absolutely have a role to play [in decarbonisation], and we're excited for that, they're still a long way off from full commercialisation and it's very expensive to make these transitions."
For Mr Bashford at the Red Door Cafe, the demand for biofuel is only getting hotter.
"We've had interest from other businesses wanting to purchase the final product," he said.
"We're currently looking at options to grow the capacity here for us to produce more."
