Biofuels

Sometime soon the government is going to tell us what it believes we might be able to do to cut the massive quantities of greenhouse gas pouring from the back-ends of our cars.

The solution, according to some people, is to use vegetable oils instead of diesel and petrol. Some people have already angered the authorities by going down to their local chip shop, emptying the vats, and putting them into their tanks - thereby depriving Gordon Brown of his hefty fuel tax.

Nothing gets the BBC's economics editor and Newsnight alumnus Evan Davis as excited as fiscal implications.

EVAN DAVIS:
A few days out of the city to the clean air of South Wales. Driving and eating - two routes to personal fulfilment in western society. Here, they've found a way of marrying the two.

The town of Burry Port hit the news last October when police found that several local people were using vegetable oil to help run their cars, illegally as it happened, without paying the requisite duty. The case inevitably sporned punned headlines, talk of the frying squad coming into town, but it actually raised some rather serious issues- where there's fat there's fuel.

In fact, around the counties of Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, we found several devotees of bio-fuel. Devotees who pay the duty but just think vegetable is the green way to fuel a car. I popped in on Kaye Angus whose car runs on waste cooking oil. She lives in this truck and wants to get that on to a vegetable diet too.

KAYE ANGUS:
I'm totally determined to keep at it but I don't want to have to cost the whole engine so I have to be careful about what I experiment with and I have to be careful about the risks that I take.

EVAN DAVIS:
But you swap your stories with other people and you're kind of swapping ideas...

KAYE ANGUS:
Yes, we keep at it, and it's just a process of investigation and experimentation.

EVAN DAVIS:
The point is that vegetable oil is good for the planet. Yes, it produces carbon dioxide as it burns - but plants take carbon out of the air when they grow. So with bio-fuels, carbon circulates between solid and gas. With petrol it goes one way - from solid carbon into gas.

A few miles away, I called on Daniel Blackburn. He's driven his car from Land's End to John o'Groats; he uses fresh cooking oil from the supermarket. Then he gave me a taste of the car's performance, so to speak. It worked fine.

Bio-fuels do work - although be careful before you try them at home. You can damage your car. But this is not just a home-grown activity - there's business interested too.

It looks like diesel, smells like diesel and in fact it is diesel but with a 5% bio-diesel vegetable matter mix. The car doesn't know the difference, it doesn't need adapting, it doesn't upset the warranty and in one form or another it's available in over 100 garages in the country.

Now if this is the start of a revolution, like all the best, the revolutionaries themselves are divided into factions, each passionate about their own particular cream.

So, pick your bio- fuel - cooking oil from Asda? If your engine has been converted. Then there's bio-diesel, drawn from oily crops like rape seed. Or there are the petrol substitutes, starchy plants can produce bio-ethanol. This can come from sugar beet or wheat. British Sugar are keen to get the market going. And whether it's bio-diesel or bio-ethanol, the safest idea for now is to blend them with traditional fuels.

MALCOLM FERGUSSON
INSTITUTE FOR EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY:
Up to a certain extent you can blend 5- 10% into conventional fuels and you can barely tell the difference and that's the easiest thing to do because we're not manufacturing anything like the quantities where we're going to supplant a large proportion of our supplies.

EVAN DAVIS:
This isn't an issue that just matters for cars and carbon, it also matters for the countryside. At the moment we mostly use the countryside to produce food, often too much food. In fact we often pay farmers to set land aside and not grow food. If we could get farmers to grow fuel, that would be a real boost to the rural economy.

It seemed like a good idea to get the farmer's point of view; Paul Radcliffe is keen.

Paul, you really see this bio-fuel as one of the great new opportunities for the countryside don't you?

PAUL RADCLIFFE:
I think it's an opportunity that needs to be grabbed. We are fairly environmentally friendly, most of the farming community. We are living - we are close to nature and growing crops for fuel is a lot greener than the refining fossil fuel.

EVAN DAVIS:
At the moment bio-fuels get a discount on fuel duty, a 20p a litre discount. What everybody here says, it needs to be more.

PAUL RADCLIFFE:
The cost of producing bio-diesel is more expensive than pumping oil out of the ground and refining it and the industry needs a start. I think taking the tax off would give the business of producing bio-diesel and ethanol the kick-start it needs to get developed.

EVAN DAVIS:
Of course, fuelling cars takes quite a lot of land. This six-acre field would provide about enough rape seed to run about three cars. Each acre could support about 5,000 miles of diesel motoring a year. But you can improve on that. This crop is more energy intensive than rape and can create bio-ethanol.

MALCOLM FERGUSSON:
You could grow most of the fuel we needed, probably on about a quarter of the agricultural land, which is an awful lot but it's not completely implausible.

EVAN DAVIS:
A quarter of the agricultural land, you could probably grow most of the fuel we need?

MALCOLM FERGUSSON:
Yes in the long term you might be able to do that.

EVAN DAVIS:
This is the farmers' dream because at the moment there are huge surpluses of food aren't there?

MALCOLM FERGUSSON:
That's the difficulty. Some would say we don't want new excuses to grow new crops because it is too intensive now and we should have less intensive and organic and so on.

EVAN DAVIS:
Among the powerful lobbies lining up to give their view on environmentally friendly driving, there is one we shouldn't forget: the car industry. Far from conspiracies to keep us on petrol, they would love to give us guilt-free car trips. They have their own view of the future: hydrogen.

AL CLARKE
SOCIETY OF MOTOR MANUFACTURERS:
There is no point in going a whole new way and trying to get the world to convert to some halfway house technology if the long-term solution is going to be hydrogen fuel cells. It is far more sensible to invest in the long-term solution, than put millions into a whole different range of technology that might just make it because we're talking about massive investment to make this work.

EVAN DAVIS:
Of course it takes energy to produce hydrogen so the deal is we have to find renewable sources of energy to do that. The question is whether we should be doing something else in the mean time.

KAYE ANGUS:
I've just bought a car for £300 and got some fuel at 65p a litre, which is made from the waste that comes out of the chip shop. There is a lot more money in making a new car and putting a hydrogen full cell in it and it being the latest carbon-neutral car. So the car industry is obviously going to look at something that is more lucrative. Not your everyday person can go ahead experimenting with hydrogen fuel cells.

EVAN DAVIS:
Hydrogen, bio-fuels, of course they do have the potential to help save the planet but until we learn to run our cars on sea water or wind, the truth is they also have some cost. There'll be a financial cost and probably unforeseen environmental costs as well. That means there is another environmental argument, a pure green argument that says the real problem is, we are trying to consume too much and that rather than relying on technology to allow us to have our cake and eat it, we should just eat less cake.

DANIEL BLACKBURN:
I can't say that I'm pure about everything but it is reducing your impact. It is a slow step by step process. You can't achieve everything but it is minimising your impact. This was a solution to my particular problem, working in a rural environment and needing a car.

EVAN DAVIS:
In the long-term, the back yard fuel refinery isn't an answer. We can't all run our cars on chip fat, we don't eat enough chips. In the long-term hydrogen may be the answer. In the meantime when it comes to sustainable driving you can expect 100 flowers

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.