More work ahead to get in the green fastlane
Mar 18 2008 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette
GETTING from A to B is not just costing us a personal and business fortune - it is leaving the planet environmentally bankrupt.
Transport emissions account for almost a third of the damaging pollutants released into the atmosphere and drove Chancellor Alistair Darling to ramp up green taxes on car drivers last week.
But while his heart was in the right place, the policy was off course, according to Teesside’s embryonic biofuels industry.
It argues that if the Government is serious about moving the UK into the environmentally friendly fast lane, something more substantial than headline-grabbing showroom taxes on gas guzzlers and an emissions penalty on nine out of 10 UK cars, is needed. But what?
“You wonder whether the green Budget was really more about raising money for the Exchequer,” said Peter Loftus, of Renew Tees Valley, which has spent the past six years fostering a cluster of renewable energy industries and technology projects on Teesside.
“What I would have liked to have seen is some positive tax allowance to encourage biofuels, so that it would have been cheaper at the pump.”
Coming as it did just three days after D1 Oils’ decision to give up the unequal struggle against heavily subsidised US biofuel imports and move its ground-breaking Teesside refinery offshore, the Budget was a huge disappointment, although Stan Higgins, chief executive of the chemical process industry cluster NEPIC acknowledges that it was probably beyond Darling’s reach to influence the biggest disincentive to business on Teesside.
Next month, the Renewable Fuels Transport Obligation (RTFO) will make it a requirement for all fuel suppliers to include 2% of plant-based oil in the mix, or face penalties. The requirement is supposed to rise to 5% by 2010. By and large, though, it will not be British or even European biofuels going into the mix, but American, enjoying a double-whammy subsidy that the Government is powerless to change on its own.
Sean Sutcliffe, of The Biofuels Corporation, which faced similar problems to D1 Oils last year, but has so far refused to budge, said: “The RFTO is important, but not half as important as sorting out the subsidy issue.”
John Seymour, rural affairs spokesman for North East Biofuels, a consortium of farmers, crushers and Tees-based processors, was also dismissive of the government’s green pledges and called for more government money to be invested in research and development.
But if biofuels have an uncertain future on Teesside, a host of innovative companies are picking up the carbon challenge and finding ways to produce a green machine.
