They re-affirm their reluctant support (see Blue-NG website), stataing that they would like to see a government framework to ensure the vegetabole crops used do not displace food crops- which they feel is inevitable, depsite local sourcing.

yes representations have been made to Greenpeace and are continuing to be made. They seem to have been swayed by the idea that this is a ‘CHP’ and is therefore a ‘good thing’, rather than treating this as something which adds to the environmental problems caused by biofuels in transport. (which they campaigned against!)

Diesel to Liquids – don’t understand your post: this scheme is nothing to do with cars, and if you are being supportive of Blue NG’s scheme, do you really want to see the whole of the UK’s agriculture turned over to producing fuel for power generation and for cars? You’re swapping food security for fuel security if you do, and accelerating climate change

Now let’s run some numbers. Beckton is supposed to use 56,000 litres of vegetable oil per day. The calorific content of that quantity of oil does match pretty closely with a continuous power of 20MW. So, I can believe 56,000 litres per day. And possibly that could come from farms within 50 miles of London, making lots of assumptions about how much land is going to be freed up after release from EU set aside controls.

However, if you scale this up to say 200 such stations across the UK, the total annual oil consumption becomes about 4 million tonnes, which is just over double the TOTAL UK production of rapeseed oil in 2005-6.

(http://www.neoda.org.uk/pages/market_update.html)

And the 2OC website talks about there being 2000 (not 200) suitable gas pressure reduction sites in the UK. Completely unsustainable if just a fraction of these are burning 50,000 litres per day.

Just in case you are in any doubt about the level of concerns on the large scale use of biofuels, please consider these comments, from the Govt’s own scientific advisors in The Guardian 25 March 2008:

“In an outspoken attack on a policy which comes into force next week, Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said it would be wrong to introduce compulsory quotas for the use of biofuels in petrol and diesel before their effects had been properly assessed.”
and
“John Beddington, the government’s current chief scientific adviser, has already expressed scepticism about biofuels. At a speech in Westminster this month (March 2008) he said demand for biofuels from the US had delivered a “major shock” to world agriculture, which was raising food prices globally. “There are real problems with the unsustainability of biofuels,” he said, adding that cutting down rainforest to grow the crops was “profoundly stupid”.”

Blue NG’s website at http://www.blue-ng.com/oursupporters_quotes.html still has the old endorsements from Greenpeace, Be the Change etc, including the comment from John Sauven, which refer to gas pressure as a source of energy:

“Blue-NG’s innovation is to integrate the concept of using the energy created, when gas pressure is reduced, into a CHP and by so doing increase significantly the electrical efficiency of the resulting CHP”

Blue NG should go back to these organisations and ask them if they would like to update the endorsements on the basis of there being no geo-pressure.

Community heating systems are great in theory and are going to be very important going forwards. But the source of the heat energy needs to be located in the middle of an area of demand for heat. That might not necessarily be the site of a gas pressure reduction station. Otherwise the heat losses in longer piping lengths will undermine blue-NG’s claim to be building the world’s most efficient generator.

The BBC report says ‘this is how we might all get our electricity’ – from rapeseed within 50 miles from London. Just how could this be scaled up? was this another misleading statement from Blue-NG?