Europe’s first train powered by bio-diesel went into service, this week, with Britain’s next prime minister Gordon Brown on board for its maiden journey. Finance minister Brown travelled on the Virgin Voyager train which left London Euston station for Llandudno on the north Wales coast.
The train has been modified to run on a blended fuel which is 20 percent environmentally-friendly bio-diesel — fuel derived from sustainable and biological sources such as rapeseed, soyabean and palm oil — and produces less carbon dioxide emissions than diesel.
Virgin Trains hopes to convert its entire fleet to run on bio-diesel if a six-month trial proves successful.
Out my way, New Mexico’s first-ever commuter light rail system already runs on B20. Albuquerque not only uses biodiesel for public transit, the city ranks 4th in the nation for percentage government use of alternative energy sources.
Just another small step forward towards reducing dependency on the Oil Patch Boys.
20%???
And the MPG??
ECA – Google is your friend.
B20 – so far – is the easiest solution, taking into account limited availability of straight biodiesel.
Any of the variations on the theme, from pure bio to pure petro, give essentially the same mileage. So, every step away from finite resources to renewable is a plus.
The few folks I know who run B20 – which happens to be in their diesel-powered pickups, not anything economical – say their mileage is the same – prices run on average about the same as straight diesel.
I have this image of starving 3rd world kids scraping their plates into the train’s gas tank.
RBG
More like lardass farmers in Yorkshire switching from alfalfa to rapeseed (what Americans call safflower – PC agriculture).
What happened to the argument that production and processing of the crop mitigates almost all the fossil fuel savings? Is this just a feel good patch?
I wonder where they get that “rapeseed.”
Virgin Trains using palm oil. Would that be virgin palm oil?
J/P=?
Mamiya – I don’t know if you ever actually read anything science-based. Certainly, you haven’t produced any peer-reviewed studies to back up your woefully incorrect opinion.
If you – or RT – cares to take the time, here’s one peer-reviewed source (.pdf) to wander through. Need more. Anyone seriously committed to ending dependence on oil and the politicians owned by oil companies, learned all this good stuff a long time ago.
I wrote before you can get biodiesel from algae. Also, you can get it from the Jatropha plant, which grows in the desert. This is good because you don’t need to waste farm land to grow it.
We really need to moving to biodiesel with as many of our vehicles as possible because biodiesel is non polluting and carbon neutral.
Unless you live in the tropics, ethanol is a joke. Biodiesel is the future. Wish we were spending money on it instead of the war.
you can’t switch overnight from petro-diesel completely to bio-diesel on a large-scale.
there are those of us who are willing to grow and learn and maybe even to sacrifice a little for the greater good (many DU posters would prefer that we now be speaking German than to face the inconvenience of rationing during the wwii era, but that’s for another post) and we realize that to completely kick OPEC out of our lives is going to take some time.
be patient, it’s coming.
you can’t switch overnight from petro-diesel completely to bio-diesel on a large-scale.
I hope you mean in terms of supply. You can run any diesel car or truck on biodiesel without any modifications. This is not true with ethanol. Because of ethanol’s corrosive properties, modifications need to be made with regards to both transporting ethanol and a car’s fuel lines.