Should I run my car on cooking oil?

A couple of years ago a group of canny and slightly subversive Welsh motorists began clearing the supermarket shelves in order to fill their car tanks, and all hell broke loose. They were pursued around town by a swathe of cop cars – it is, remember, illegal to power your car on a duty-free substance. The alternative fuel scene had arrived.

But this form of wacky races has largely become respectable. And if you do convert your engine to run on veg oil, you’ll need to establish the amount of duty payable per litre, a complex business dependent on whether its chemical consistency qualifies it for a biofuel reduction (call 0845 010 9000 for details).
Alternatively, you could join a co-operative such as Veg Oil Motoring (vegoilmotoring.com) that buys in bulk and pay your duty that way. Even McDonald’s has announced its intention to start powering its delivery fleet on its own waste chip fat as a carbon-cutting exercise.

Mcfuels and other biofuel cheerleaders (including George Bush) were bound to make environmentalists suspicious. In fact the whole issue of alternative fuels has become a very hot potato. The UK Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation intends to scale up biofuels in order to cut overall carbon emissions by 1m tonnes by 2010 (equivalent in carbon terms to removing 1m cars from the road).

But as demand increases, it seems inevitable that provenance becomes less certain, even for waste cooking oil, and that a biofuel boom will lead to the ploughing up of virgin habitats, giant monocultures, land right disputes and an unseemly bun fight over ’soft commodities’ such as maize, sugar and corn (biofuel staples), leading to the awful conundrum of feed the world or power the rich world’s private car fleet. Besides, current waste oil supplies could only feasibly power around one-350th of the UK’s cars.

Homegrown biofuels don’t escape censure either. According to research, to be on course to reach the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation would require all UK set-aside land to be planted with biofuels by 2009, with implications for wildlife biodiversity. But the sustainable biofuel sector is fighting back. Blooming Futures (bloomingfutures.com) has carried out extensive life-cycle analysis on renewable, local rapeseed, and converts diesel engines to run on PPO – or pure plant oil.

Observer