Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

The battle is on to encourage public transport operators to try ‘alternative’
fuels. The Department of Transport is providing £100 000 in grants
to local authorities, allowing them to run trials of the various fuels,
with the aim of reducing consumption and pollution.

The department says preference will be given to trials involving liquid
petroleum gas (LPG), compressed natural gas and electricity (for adapted
vehicles), rather than ‘biofuels’ such as rape methyl ester (RME), derived
from rape seed oil. But it adds that ‘the role of alternative fuels has
not been fully thought through’.

Even so, one of the first bidders was the Reading Bus Company, through
Reading District Council. Two months ago (Technology, 10 July) the company
finished a trial costing about £5000 in which three buses ran on
RME imported from Italy for six months. ‘There’s no doubt we were very happy
with the fuel,’ says Rod Wilson, managing director of Reading Bus Company.
‘We are being pressed to buy more. The problem is that it’s twice the price
of conventional fossil fuel.’ Diesel costs about 10p per litre, whereas
the Italian RME cost 24p, though Wilson thinks local manufacturers could
provide it for 12p.

Britain has 6600 bus and coach operators whose vehicles travel almost
4 billion kilometres annually. Reducing pollution from public transport
vehicles would help to meet Britain’s future targets for greenhouse gas
emissions. Malcolm Ferguson, director of Earth Resources Research, an independent
research organisation, comments, ‘Compressed natural gas has advantages
in terms of carbon dioxide emissions over petroleum-based fuels. That makes
it attractive for large vehicles; although you need special strong fuel
tanks, the specialist operators can handle that.

‘The problem with biofuels can be in emissions of particles (of unburnt
carbon). Also they may need intensive agriculture, so they are not necessarily
the best from all environmental aspects.’

Reading Bus Company’s latest bid, supported by the council, would be
to run between 20 and 40 buses for more than six months on RME. Local authorities
have until the end of September to put in their bids to win funding for
trials of fuels in their area. The winners should be announced in October,
in time to start the trials before the end of the financial year.

However, the department is unsure how it will allocate funds if the
bids exceed the available grant, but a spokesman says that ‘LPG, compressed
natural gas and electricity are the ones that are mentioned first’. Also,
says the spokesman, ‘the government recognises that there is a role for
alternative fuels, but until the trials we cannot be sure how far to go.’