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Golden Valley Environment Group
Biodiesel at the Hay Festival 2007
This year we worked with the Hay Festival organisers on various aspects of Hay's environmental impacts. As responsible organisers of a major event Hay have been working to find out what are their major impacts on the environment and developing a plan to reduce those impacts.
The biggest impact in terms of climate change comes from people travelling to the festival. There are literally thousands of people arriving from all over the world (and a few locals too!). As each travels to the festival they leave a carbon footprint.
Hay has done various things to try to get more people travelling together (sharing lifts and taxis for examples).
Of their own impacts one of the major ones is the use of cars and fuel for running the site operations - there are lots of generators providing electricity for example. This year we managed to get some locally produced biodiesel for them to use. This is being blended into the fuel mix for diesel fueled cars (used mainly to ferry artists to and from events/the railway station - sometimes a lot further) and some of the on site machinery.
Richard Hill of Intelligent Energy Systems Ltd makes the biodiesel using waste (ie used) vegetable oil. He is careful only to use used rape seed oil. It comes from cooking/catering outfits. He cleans it and then esterifies it - this makes the properties much more like diesel and less like vegetable oil - so that it can be used in unmodified engines.
We went to a lot of trouble to carefully distinguish this type of biodiesel from industrially produced biodiesel which is often going to use specially grown oil crops. The trouble with that will be that you will see competition for food crops and agricultural land, potentially deforestation so that plantations of high-oil yielding crops can be grown - you will hear about palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia for example. Ironically this can lead to high emissions of CO2 - the very gas we are aiming to reduce....For information on some of the downsides have a look at George Monbiot on biofuels from the Guardian.
Using waste vegetable oils, processing them on a small-scale and using them locally avoids most of the downsides.
It's still early days in terms of developing biofuels as replacements for conventional liquid fuels. It can be expensive - biodiesel costs about the same as conventional at the moment - and that's with quite a substantial tax advantage. Before you switch to using it you should satisy yourself that your engine can cope and develop a plan to gently introduce it by mixing with conventional fuel if you are happy that your engine will be ok with it.
Biodiesel has the advantage of being biodegradeable and less toxic than conventional diesel - so spills and leaks are less damaging.
Filling up the biodiesel tank at Hay for on-site use and refuelling the car fleet.
Scooter - looks like he's in charge of the situation....
This is one of the official cars (it says so!) which can use a biodiesel blend - it's a 4WD but it is capable of over 40 mpg apparently (that's not bad).
Here's a car that can't use biodiesel - fun to drive but....
The amber nectar (or am I thinking of something else?)