Thursday, 26 July 2007

The future is Golden Yellow or possible mucky brown coloured

The future, according to Orange, is Orange. Well no it isn;t Mr Smarty Pants. The future is a yellowy colour, or possibly mucky brown, depending on whether you use SVO or WVO. Allow me to explain.
Some people rely on dead dinosaurs to provide the fuel for their cars. This is a very flawed decision, as Dinosaurs, apart from being dead, are not very good at making Petrol or Diesel, other than by dying in the first place, being compressed and decaying for millios of years, then being dug up and sold by Arabs.
Alternative fuels are the future. Whilst in the ideal world we wouls all be flying around in electrically powered rocket cars, that is a bit of a dream. Electricity, by and large is produced by burning dead dinosaurs, which will one day run out. Unless we find more dead dinosaurs we are in trouble.
SVO, (Straight Vegetable Oil) is a viable alternative to diesel which is available now. Any diesel engine can be easily and cheaply converted to burn Vegetable Oil, or a blend of Veg and diesel, which would reduce our dependance on fossil fuels. It is produced from Biomass like Rape Seed and is carbon neutral, the emmisions created in buring it beng absorbed by the next crop that grows......this makes sense to me. I'm sure I recall basic physics saying that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only change forms. So we change potential pollution into chemical energy to promote growth of the very fuel that created the pollution in the first place - neat solution.
Apart from the green credentials SVO is only around 36 to 46 pence per litre, compared with about 99 pence per litre for diesel fuel - in other words half price running costs, or less. Customs and Excise used to want a share of the savings in the form of fuel duty, however, since 1st July they are no longer interested in small volume users, so if you use less than 2500 litres per year, you don't have to declare it or register to pay duty. RESULT FOR THE GREEN CAMPAIGNERS!
Duty was about 28 pence per litre, but with that gone anyone using SVO can now fully benefit from chepaer fuel costs. The average driver covering 10,000 miles per year at 20 to the gallon or more will fall outside of those requirements - most of us could now use SVO instead of diesel, without paying duty and supported by the law.
I for example use a Lifgier Ambra microcar capable already of 80 miles per gallon of diesel. I have converted it to run on 100% vegetable oil, meaing that therotically, ona pure price comparison against diesel I am now achieving the equivalent of 150 to 21 miles per gallon.
But even better than that, I am now planning on using WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil) supplied by a locla Cafe. The proprietor of the said Cafe uses Vegatble Oil to provide greasy Breakfasts and Fish and Chips to truckers, then throws away the used oil. In some parts of the country he would have to pay someone to tske away this "Industrial Waste"
I will happily take it away from him for free, as filtered it will run just as readily in my car as SVO would. Okay, it's a little messy and time consuming to prepare, but it is free fuel. All it costs me is the cost of a storage tank, some filters and a pump. I now have y own little filling station in my driveway. Remember the fuel crisis a few years ago? I can;t wait for the next one. I will have 1000 litres of fuel in my storage facility, enough to last over two years at the current useage rate.
The future is definetly mucky brown for me.