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Biofuel: Ireland Discovers The Whey To Go…
By Mr Ethanol | November 7, 2007
Belfast Telegraph:
There’s a revolution going on in Ireland and it looks pretty whiffy. Over the past year the republic has become Europe’s third-bestselling market of cars that run on bioethanol E85, behind Sweden and France. The Irish, however, are making their bioethanol from whey - as in the leftovers from cheese production. In doing so, they’ve given a whole new meaning to the term “alternative” fuel.
Some 600 Irish drivers currently fill up their tanks with bioethanol E85 every week. So far this year, sales of the renewable fuel are up by 900 per cent on 2006 and around 1,000 flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs) will be sold in Ireland in 2007. Saab, which is Europe’s biggest seller of FFVs, says that more than 90 per cent of Irish sales of its 9-5 model range are of the BioPower flex-fuel variety and that 9-5 sales have doubled in Ireland since the BioPower variants were launched. Ford, which already sells bioethanol-compatible versions of the Focus and C-Max, will launch flex-fuel versions of the S-Max, Galaxy and Mondeo models early next year.
Although annual sales of 1,000 such cars might not seem that impressive, it’s probably four times as many as will be sold in the UK this year and the UK new car market is eight and a half times as large as the Republic of Ireland’s.
Remarkably, all of Ireland’s ethanol is domestically produced, at a time when most of Europe still relies on Brazil for supply. And because the ethanol is sourced from waste matter, this eliminates one of the most widely quoted criticisms of biofuels, which is that valuable food resources are being diverted for fuel usage. Read it all.
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