The UK government seems to have decided that an expansion of use of biofuels for road transport is possibly not the best idea ever.

In a sudden outbreak of common sense, they have acknowledged that diverting crops from food production to biofuel production may in fact drive up the price of food. They are debate whether to abandon the EUs target of 10% biofuel usage by 2020, a target which I believe the EU government themselves are thinking of scrapping.

Ruth Kelly for the government made some points about rainforest deforestation and suggested a softly-softy approach

“To tackle climate change we will need to develop new, cleaner fuels - but that doesn’t mean pushing forward indiscriminately on biofuels that may do more harm than good.”

Which was rather contrary to previous policy which seemed to be pushing biofuels as a general panacea and solution to the fuel crisis.

The reality is that as such epic quantities of land have to be diverted to biofuel production to have any meaningful effect, the price of food is inevitably driven up making poor people poorer (or just plain starving them).

My personal view toward a solution is to change the energy storage medium for all short-range vehicles to battery-electric combined with a clear nuclear-power generation strategy. Then the inevitably higher-priced hydrocarbon fuels can be dedicated to longer-range transportion where the energy density afforded will still be neccesary. This could perhaps include high-capacity PHEVs.

Unfortunately, vehicle manufacturers are still faffing about with hydrogen fuel cell designs for which there is no present-day infrastructure and arguably require far more energy in their operation cycle than battery electric systems anyway.

You’ll have probably heard on the news today that Virgin Atlantic flew an empty Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam with one engine running on a 20% biofuel mix.

According to Flight Global , the biofuel was supposedly an algae derived fuel stored in a test-specific tank and used to partially power one of the 747’s General Electric CF6-80C2 engines. The engine which apparently had a short TBO was to be immediately removed and inspected after the flight. Other press sources today suggest that the biofuel was coconut derived.

I made a calculation a while back to find out the ammount of coconut plantation required for a Boeing 747 flight from London to Beijing, China.

• Distance London to Beijing: 5059 miles.
• Cruise Speed of Boeing 747-400: 576mph
• Fuel consumption of Boeing 747-400: ~3200 usg/hour

So, the flight time would be approximately 8 hours 47 minutes (not strictly counting takeoff and approach) and the average fuel burned would be about 28,096 US gallons.

Now, coconut plantations provide (at best) 230 US gallons of biofuel per acre.

This would mean that for one flight in one direction for a Boeing 747 100% fueled by coconut derived biofuel, you would need a plantation of 122 acres for one year.

This is equivalent to the area covered by about 60 football pitches. Where on earth (literally) are all these plantations supposed to go? Want to fly back from Beijing? Double the size of the plantation for that one return flight!

Note that the figures for the calculation aren’t checked as they’re hard to find authoritative sources for. Needless to say, the end result is never going to be a trivial figure.

According to the BBC, the EU is rethinking their target of reaching 10% biofuels use.

Amazingly, they’ve actually worked out that if you use crops for fuel….wait for it….it pushes the price of food up meaning that the poor find it very hard to feed themselves. This has already been seen to happen in the Americas and now the EU Government can see it beginning to happen here.

Stavros Dima, the EU Environment Commissioner said that it would be better to miss the EU biofuel goals rather than hit them and harm the poor.

I’ve been harping on about this for a while but at least it’s refreshing to see that the EU Government can take a hint when something isn’t going to work as opposed to the “Always right even when they’re wrong” style of government practiced elsewhere in the world.

What we really need to reduce CO2 emissions [aka secure energy supplies] is to develop new nuclear power as soon as possible.