Biofuelling the nation
If not oil, then what? Well, one idea is to use fat from the animals we farm to fuel our nation. How?
Well, the new Listener has a very interesting article about biofuels explaining precisely how. It starts:
Biofuels are already common in parts of Europe, America and Asia, where vehicles run on plant-based fuels like ethanol, usually made from sugar cane, or biodiesels made from oils like palm or canola.
“In any country, you investigate the feedstock you have the most of,” says Andrew Smith of Massey University’s Centre for Energy Research. In New Zealand, those feedstocks, or source materials, turn out to be tallow (animal fat) and whey (a milk waste from the manufacture of casein), byproducts of the meat-processing and dairy industries.
Excess tallow from the meat-processing industry is currently graded, with the high-grade tallow used as a food additive, the medium grades exported for use in soaps and candles, and the low-grade tallow recycles into animal feed. In a project investigating the feasibility of using tallow for commercial production of biodiesel, Smith has calculated that New Zealand’s annual production of 150,00 tonnes of tallow is enough to substitute about five percent of the country’s diesel use.
The major complaint about European buses running on plant-sourced biodiesel is the “annoying smell of French fries” coming from the exhaust. So, will vehicles that run on New Zealand biodiesel smell like a Sunday roast? No such luck. Smith says that they will smell just like the European vehicles, “like fried food”.
Well, I’m sorry! I never said the post-oil world would be a bed of roses 
June 26th, 2005 at 6:20 pm
Interesting conundrum then for us vegans!?
June 26th, 2005 at 8:40 pm
Geez.. I never considered the problem for Vegans… have to be all from plants then… of course plants are supposedly more efficient (in terms of kCal per Hectare) than growing sheep that eat plants. I wonder if it’s true here though.
June 26th, 2005 at 9:41 pm
Wait a minute!
If we use all the tallow that we would’ve used for soap to replace the diesel I have to reckon we’re going to have a worse odour problem than just the smell of the exhaust fumes
respectfully
BJ
June 27th, 2005 at 12:59 am
eww body odour and animal fat!!
And I thought cycling past kfc in the evenings was bad enough
(for the record I buy organic fruit soap)