Green Fuels Lead Drive To A Brighter Future
Arresting CO2: the use of biofuel vehicles could reduce global warming. Pictured with a Flexi Fuel Ford Focus - Europe’s first bioethanol-powered production car - are Andy Taylor (right), Ford’s European sustainability director, and Assistant Chief Constable Steve Mortimore of Avon & Somerset Police, UK.
AS DEVELOPMENT of green fuels expands in response to climate change, one business partnership is helping to reduce global warming by investing in bioethanol-powered cars.
Green fuels - or biofuels - are made from an ever-increasing range of plant products including grain, rapeseed and sugar beet. Not only do they reduce carbon emissions but growing plants to provide the raw material creates a new market for farmers in the United Kingdom.
Nearly a quarter of all UK carbon emissions come from road transport. Compared with conventional fossil fuels, biofuels reduce overall emissions by as much as 70 per cent. Burning biofuels also releases carbon dioxide but growing the plants needed to produce them absorbs a comparable amount of the gas from the atmosphere.
A desire to reduce carbon emissions is the driving force behind a new partnership in Somerset, south-west England. It has brought together public and private organisations with Ford, the manufacturer of Europe’s first bioethanol-powered production car, the Focus Flexi Fuel Vehicle (FFV).
The Somerset Biofuels partnership is buying 40 Focus FFVs to run on an 85-per-cent blend of bioethanol from locally grown grain that will be processed in one of the UK’s first large-scale plants for producing bioethanol being built in the county. The bioethanol is blended with conventional petrol.
The partnership involves Green Spirit Fuels, Somerset County Council, Avon & Somerset Police, the Environment Agency and Wessex Water. The partnership’s vehicles currently run on bioethanol produced in Spain but will switch to bioethanol from Green Spirit Fuels’ new production plant in Somerset when it is completed.
The plant under construction at Henstridge will eventually convert 340,000 tonnes of wheat a year into 131 million litres of bioethanol. Green Spirit will be the first company to produce bioethanol from wheat when its Henstridge plant comes on stream in autumn 2008.
Elsewhere in the UK, Green Spirit Fuels (GSF) has announced plans for a second bioethanol plant at Grimsby in eastern England. The Humber Biofuels plant will join Wessex Biofuels under the GSF banner and will use about 650,000 tonnes of wheat to generate 200,000 tonnes of ethanol annually.
Biofuels are not new - Ford’s Model T car of almost 100 years ago was designed to run on ethanol produced from corn - but targets for biofuels set by the European Union and the UK government are likely to increase demand for them.
Bioethanol will be used to fuel a growing number of cars on UK roads, according to Green Spirit Fuels’ finance director, Arthur Llewellyn. “The UK will need 10 production plants like the one in Henstridge to meet the government’s requirements,” he said.
The government’s Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) means that by 2010, five per cent of all the fuel sold at UK filling stations must come from a renewable source. The measure is predicted to save a million tonnes of carbon a year by 2010, equivalent to taking a million cars off the road.
Under the RTFO, biofuel may be supplied as either five-per-cent blends that can be used in any vehicle, or as higher blend fuels as vehicle technology and warranties allow. Today, almost all cars in the UK can use a blend of up to five-per-cent biofuel without affecting the manufacturer’s warranty.
The UK’s House of Commons environment, food and rural affairs select committee recently published a report on the role of bioenergy in climate change, and recommended that the government follow the Somerset Biofuels partnership’s model.
Meanwhile, in Norfolk, eastern England, British Sugar is to start producing 70 million litres of bioethanol a year from sugar beet at a plant being built at Wissington.
“Our bioethanol plant will be a significant step in the development of renewable fuels in the UK,” said Mark Carr, British Sugar’s chief executive. “Renewable fuels are an essential part of our future and our children’s future which will contribute significant benefit to the environment.”
The growing shift to biofuels is good news for farmers who are always looking for new crops to grow and new outlets for existing crops. While bioethanol production holds out the prospect of lucrative contracts for grain, biodiesel production could use rapeseed that is grown widely on UK farms.
At the UK’s first large-scale biodiesel plant near Motherwell in Scotland, Argent Energy is producing 50 million litres of biodiesel a year. It is sold on forecourts in a blend of five-per-cent biodiesel to
95-per-cent mineral diesel.
The company makes its biodiesel from tallow and used cooking oil – by-products of other industries and which have few alternative uses. The production plant is capable of using a variety of raw materials including virgin oils such as rapeseed oil.
Argent plans operations in other parts of the UK and was recently given planning permission for a second plant at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire.
Jim Walker, Argent Energy’s vice-chairman, said: “As the flow of biodiesel continues to build, it means that more ordinary people can contribute to the fight against climate change simply by the choice they make at the pump.”
UK supermarkets are taking a lead in introducing biofuel blends at their service stations. Tesco sells bioethanol blends and biodiesel at more than 200 of its outlets and recently began running most of its truck fleet on a 50-per-cent biodiesel blend.
