andygates

Morrison's have started selling B30 biodiesel on most of their forecourts.  That's 30% biodiesel, 70% dinodiesel, with the bio part being made from recycled veg oil and from UK-sourced rapeseed oil.  No palm oil drama, and at that low blend, pretty easy to adopt (your first tank may feel rough: stick it out for two, because the first tank of bio flushes some crap from your tank and that needs to work through).

A few years back I started using veg oil in my diesel, and since I consider it an important string to the carbon-climate catastrophe conundrum, I made a song and dance of it and bothered to register with Customs.  That's what you had to do: register as a biofuels producer and send in monthly returns and payments.  Monthly returns of "24 litres used" and payments of  about £3.40 on average.  Obviously, this legislation wasn't designed for home users; the system was cumbersome and annoying and not cost-effective. 

How does one change the system?  Overload it!  So many people have registered that Customs have given up.  From 01 July 2007, biofuel producers with an annual turnover of under 2500 litres will not have to register, be visited or pay duty.  Home users are considered teeny-tiny producers.  So we can carry on playing, legally, and Customs will get off our backs, and the cash savings just went kerching.  Fourteen pounds per tank, thankyouverymuch.

We won!

Meanwhile the debate about sustainability is raging - I can't say I like the idea of clear-cutting mangrove swamps to grow palm oil.  But it frees up ad-hoc recycling and experimentation, lets small businesses run their fleet on their used cooking oil, allows yurtly collectives to hand-trample their oilcake for that vintage tractor and all that good stuff.