Thursday 23 August 2007

The Cost of Going Green.

OK, so you feel bad about driving around in a gas-guzzler (even if it does look fantastic) and you decide to do something about it. Step one would be to find something that guzzles less and still meets your needs. In this case it had to be something that would fit both a surfboard and the family, so a decent sized hatchback was as small as I was willing to go. I knew of biodiesel and after doing some research it seemed the most carbon neutral way to go. I’ll explain…

Biodiesel is basically vegetable oil and alcohol mixed together with a couple of bits then removed after their mixing and reacting. The actual process can be done by anyone who’s not afraid of a few chemical symbols and is able to follow a recipe. In brief, the oil and alcohol (either methanol or ethanol) are carefully measured and mixed in the presence of a catalyst (potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide) and then the by-product of glycerol removed. What this does is it essentially makes the resulting mixture behave more like dino-diesel, (that’s the stuff you buy at the servo) so you can shove it in your tank and cruise off, just don’t try putting it in a petrol engine – diesel engines only.

Personally, even though I used to teach chemistry I have no interest in making this stuff. The alcohols are toxic, the hydroxides caustic and the mess involved is just not my scene – best left to the professionals I reckon. Biodiesel is becoming more common in this country and is pretty popular in Europe with most diesel being sold there having a 5% biodiesel 95% dino-diesel mix as a minimum standard. This is known as B5 and the proposal is to have diesel as B10 (10% Biodiesel) by 2010.

Unfortunately there are some complications. Some older diesel motors are not ideal to run on biodiesel because it is such a good solvent that it will slowly dissolve rubber parts of the motor and hoses so you need a car that has only synthetic parts in it, which is most of them made after 1993. There are a few more issues, which are discussed on a heap of web sites – just choose your preferred propaganda slant; positive reports from biodiesel manufacturers and subtle rubbishing from oil companies and their mates.

The biggest hitch for me was that if I wanted to run biodiesel, I needed a diesel motor, which meant I needed a new car. Now for me a ‘new’ car means a second hand car and after a lot of hunting around, I settled on a VW Transporter TDI. Her name was Bo and she was once a country ambulance. After some serious renovations she was kitted out with a bed and was ready for a tour of the East coast.

I found a couple of sources of biodiesel, got a stack of old 25 litre chemical containers and we set off on a low impact research tour hunting for eco-products that could be sold via our planned online store – EcoDepot. It felt good to be driving around in an eco-friendly way, you wanted everyone to know, to spread the word, to get people pushing for this option to become mainstream.

I had come a long way since that day at the conference and felt I was doing well. Then I started thinking about how I could go further and that is where the whole ‘SVO’ or Straight Vegetable Oil system reared its head…