Poop Fuel, Vijay Mallya & Nirav Modi

In this week’s newsletter, we talk about the sustainability of a new jet fuel, one reform that can bring back India’s fugitives, and a lot more.

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Is jet fuel from human poop actually sustainable?

Taking a flight is convenient for you and me. It could be expensive. But it saves a lot of travel time. But it’s not so convenient for the earth.

Planes actually emit around 20 times as much CO2 per passenger/per km as a train and 4 times as much as a bus. In total they emit around 100 times more CO₂ per hour than a shared bus or train ride. And that could translate into about 1 billion tonnes of CO2 every year or about 4% of human-induced global warming. So if aviation continues to boom, the earth could be 0.1° Celsius warmer by 2050 because of planes alone. Now, that might not seem huge. But let’s put it this way. If aviation were a country instead of an industry, it would be the world’s sixth-biggest emitter after China, the US, India, Russia and Japan! Scary, we know.

So what’s the solution, you ask?

Well, people could fly less for sure. But that could hurt the aviation industry and would be a massive pain for people in general. So maybe Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is the way to go. To put it another way, we use jet fuel that doesn’t come from non-renewable energy sources like crude oil or refined petroleum. So you could either use food crops such as rapeseed, palm oil, soy and sugar cane to make it. Or alternatively even convert waste into jet fuel ― it could be used cooking oils, municipal sewage or even crop and animal waste. Basically, all of this goes through a rigorous heating process that filters out the oil from dirt and water. Then you throw hydrogen into the mix. And voila! You get SAF.

This is then blended with regular fossil fuels so that it can power planes. It could potentially cut carbon emissions by up to 80%! What’s more? Its chemical composition is a lot like normal jet fuel, making it compatible with engines designed for traditional fuel. So you don’t have to worry about modifying existing plane engines to accommodate SAF.

But as cool as it sounds, here’s the thing. Despite many airlines aspiring to meet 10% of their fuel needs through SAF by 2030, only about 0.1% of it is in use today. And that’s because making SAF comes with its own set of challenges.

To begin with, growing food crops solely for fuel requires vast swathes of land. And that means mass deforestation, displacing biodiversity such as animals and plants already under threat or even indigenous peoples all over the world.

Another concern is that SAF doesn’t come cheap. Until production scales up, SAF could cost two to four times more than the historical average cost of regular jet fuel. A report by consulting firm Bain & Company has proof. It suggests that if the global aviation industry wants to bring down its emissions to almost zero by 2050, it will have to invest close to a whopping $2 trillion. And that’s also because it needs capital to build refineries that will make SAF. It could eat up airlines’ razor thin profit margins, while even making ticket prices expensive for flyers.

That’s why researchers are constantly looking for new ways and sources to make SAF with minimal roadblocks. Recently, for instance, Firefly Green Fuels, a UK-based aviation company came up with a way to process human poop into SAF! That’s definitely weird. But it could lower carbon footprint by 90% as compared to standard jet fuel. It’s also may be a solution to a lot of problems SAF production is currently grappling with.

See, we told you earlier that you could need a lot of crops or waste to make sustainable jet fuel. But the thing is that a lot of other industries like the automobile and energy sector have their eyes on these resources to make sustainable fuel too. So you need something that the aviation sector can solely rely on to meet its needs. And human poop could solve that.

For one, it’s available in abundance. And two, flights can save up on money they need to source SAF. Meaning, if they have to lay their hands on crop residue or waste from oils and sewage, they’ll have to spend money to transport these resources from different places. But human poop could be sourced more easily from aircraft and airports, reducing raw material costs.

But before you get too excited about this novel idea, here’s something you might want to know.

See, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) says that it expects to have the capacity to make at least 69 billion litres of SAF by 2028. And to meet such expectations, we’ll need scalable resources. Now, although human poop could be available in plenty, you can’t scale production easily. So even if all of the UK’s sewage waste is put into making jet fuel, it would still only meet 5% of the country’s jet fuel requirements. In case you didn’t know, the UK has a legal mandate to meet at least 10% of its jet fuel needs through SAF by 2030. So the other half of its needs have to be sourced from things like cooking oils and crops.

Another problem SAF made from human waste may not solve is contrails. We’re talking about those streaks of white cloud that planes leave behind in clear blue skies when they fly. Actually, a lot of heat is produced from this aesthetic emission. And it also contributes to making temperatures warmer. For context, between 2000 and 2018 contrails created over half of the aviation sector’s warming impact. This was even more than the CO2 emissions from burning the fuel itself. So that’s that.

And finally, SAF from crops could still be more sustainable since plants absorb carbon as they grow. So eventually, they offset the amount of carbon emitted from their use. But humans are carbon emitters. And converting their waste into jet fuel may not really be more sustainable than crops itself.

So yeah, human poop may not be the ultimate solution to all of SAF’s problems, but it’s definitely one of the wheels that can get the SAF truck going.

How to bring back Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi

₹40,000 crores!

That’s how much India’s top 10 Fugitive Economic Offenders (FEOs) owed the country as of 2023. And you too can enter the ignominious list if you go on a run to avoid prosecution and you have an arrest warrant against you for economic offences worth at least ₹100 crores.

Some of the big names in this list include Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, and Mehul Choksi. All 3 individuals left the country when they realised they could be prosecuted in India for various economic offences. And the Indian government has been trying to bring them back to face justice. However, there have been difficulties in getting these people back home. For context, over the last five years India has declared 10 people as FEOs. But we’ve only been able to successfully extradite 4 of them over the same period.

So why is it so hard to bring back fugitives who’ve taken refuge overseas?

Well, on the face of it, extraditing a criminal from a foreign country isn’t a cakewalk even if we have an extradition treaty in place. In fact, despite having extradition treaties with over 40 countries, you can see that progress has been slow. This is because the countries we work with have to believe these fugitives are guilty of crimes that we accuse them of. So it’s incumbent on Indian authorities to prove this much. But that’s not all. They must also be convinced that extradited individuals are not denied basic human rights and are accorded a fair and free trial. And this is where things get tricky.

When our authorities tried to get the UK to extradite some of these popular fugitives there was one common argument their lawyers relied on. They said “Hey, India’s prison conditions are pretty bad. Their health could be at risk.” And courts in the UK seem to agree with this line of thought.

In 2014, a UK High Court refused to extradite Raymond Varley, a British citizen after he was found guilty of a non-economic offence in India. Its reason? Varley was a senior citizen with a mental illness whose condition could deteriorate if sent to India. Another similar case occurred in 2017. A UK Court refused to extradite Sanjeev Chawla, a criminal guilty of match-fixing because Tihar Jail’s conditions were appalling and detention there would amount to a violation of his human rights. He was eventually extradited 3 years later. But that’s the only time we’ve managed to extradite an individual from the UK after we signed an extradition treaty with the country back in 1992.

Okay. So, this all boils down to our prison conditions then?

Well, that could be one key reason.

Because Indian prisons are in fact overcrowded. Over the last five years, their average occupancy rate has been nearly 25% more than they could accommodate. And the major culprit is undertrials — close to three-fourths of these inmates are still in the process of being proven guilty. And while the number of undertrials increased by an average of 5% year on year, the prison capacity has increased by a measly 2%.

Then there’s the problem of insufficient expenditure. If you look at the Prison Statistics reports of the past 5 years, you’ll see that although the government does allocate higher amounts to the prison system every year, it might not be enough. For instance, we spend an average of just ₹130 per prisoner every day. That includes everything ― food, clothing, medicines and vocational training to help them improve their skills. On the other hand, as per the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World Report, it will cost nearly ₹180 per day to meet a person’s basic nutritional needs alone.

And finally, another thing going against the prison system might be the lack of medical staff. In 2021, The Leaflet pointed out that only 59% of the allotted provision of medical staff was employed in prisons. That put the number at about 1.4 medical staff per prison — including doctors and others. That may not be enough to care for the health of the inmates in over-occupied prisons.

So what’s the solution, you ask?

Well, we might need some major prison reforms.

See, we told you earlier that undertrials are overcrowding prisons. So you’d think that utilising funds to build more prisons would be a solution. But that’s only partially correct.

Overcrowding could be tackled to a certain extent if undertrials as well as convicts over 75 years old or those who have mental illnesses could be released as a respite measure. This could shrug some pressure off jail occupancy rates. But since that may not always be possible, such inmates could also be moved to open prisons instead of jail cells. And this isn’t a solution we whipped out of thin air. It’s something that a report by a Parliamentary Committee on Home Affairs suggested a couple of months ago.

Another suggestion it has up its sleeve is to improve prison budgets without actually increasing them. See, India has a few colonial-era jails that are over a century old. These could be converted into tourist attractions to bring in revenue. The Gujarat Government for example has a proposal to convert Ahmedabad’s Jail Bhajiya House, an eatery run by jail inmates into a restaurant cum historical gallery. And that makes sense since here’s where revolutionaries like Mahatma Gandhi, Kasturba Gandhi, Sardar Patel and many others spent jail time. If other states could identify similar sources of revenue, it could help them manage expenses more efficiently.

But yeah, that doesn’t mean prisons don’t need better financial assistance from the government. Over 10 state governments don’t receive funds for prison reforms at all. So identifying and fixing those lapses is something governments may have to do before they start appealing to foreign governments to extradite Indian fugitives.

Until then inadequate systems will only make it easy for these folks to escape extradition. They just need to convince foreign courts that India’s prisons aren’t fit to accommodate them. And yeah, the fugitives will continue to remain fugitives.

Hopefully, things improve in the near future.

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