D1 Oils - Charts, News and Discussion

Transcript of BBC PM piece

Presenter:



The pantomime season is in full swing, so if you’ve met a man offering you magic beans that can combat global warming – mindful of Jack and his beanstalk experience – you might be cautious. But hard-headed City investors have been putting big money into a project to grow a tropical plant. It’s supposed to have the almost magical qualities that it grows very fast and can be turned into bio-fuel to power our cars with fewer greenhouse emissions than conventional energy sources. Our business genie Nils Blythe has been doing some digging.



Nils Blythe (Business Reporter):



In a huge greenhouse near Amsterdam a machine is measuring compost into pots under the watchful eye of Dutch scientist Andre Smjyer (phonetic).The pots will be seeded with a plant called Jatropha. At this research centre they’re trying to find the best variety to grow commercially. Andre showed me the fruit and seeds.







Andre:



This is the packet that just arrived this morning from Latin America. But if I can crush it for you – there you are - well if I press it between my fingers you see a show of material coming out.



Nils Blythe:



Yeah, I see, yeah. And that’s the oil?



Andre:



And that’s the oil. And after refinery, it gets a wonderful diesel product.



Nils Blythe



The Jatropha grows fast and can be planted on marginal land where little else will grow.





Andre:



You see the plants: they’re varying from one feet to two and a half feet high.



Nils Blythe:



The oil, once refined, can be mixed with ordinary diesel to produce a fuel which has slightly lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional products. The EU says that all diesel will soon have to contain at least five per cent bio-fuel. Crops like rapeseed and soya can also be turned into bio-fuel. But the Jatropha enthusiasts like Andre think their crop will be much cheaper.



Andre:



Jatropha is as magic as a plant but a little bit stronger.



Nils Blythe:



These are our ‘magic beans’ that you are producing here.





Andre:



Um, we keep our foot on the ground, but it’s really interesting stuff, yes.



Nils Blythe:



But some environmental groups are concerned about how and where bio-fuel crops like Jatropha will be grown, as Ed Mathew of Friends of the Earth told me.



Ed Mathew (Friends of the Earth):



Our experience of many other crops, particularly soy and palm oil, is that these crops can displace huge areas of rain forest, and they can also be put on land without the permission of local communities. So from both a social and environmental perspective it can be done very destructively. We believe that bio-fuels can be a part of the solution to climate change but they have to be developed in a sustainable way. Otherwise it’s going to be a disaster.



Nils Blythe:



The environmental groups think bio-fuels must be looked at more broadly from the planting of the crops all the way to the refinery. To see how Jatropha’s turned into bio-diesel I’ve come to Teeside, another small refinery on an industrial estate outside Middlesbrough. It belongs to D1 Oils. Now this is the company which is already planting Jatropha in ten different countries. The company’s founder is Karl Watkin.



Karl Watkin:



This is our refinery in Middlesbrough. It’s four portable refineries linked together to make a forty thousand ton-a-year unit.



Nils Blythe:



He’s raised over eighty million pounds to develop these small refineries to start planting Jatropha in Africa, India and Southeast Asia.



Karl Watkin:



We’re not encouraging people to tear down rain forests, and at the end of the day there’s a balance to be struck. And I’ve just come back from Swaziland, and in Swaziland there was three hundred and eighty-seven people right out in the sticks who treated me like a king because we’d created jobs for them, and all of those people had never worked in their lives and they are now working in a very, very poor part of Africa.



Nils Blythe:



But where Karl Watkin and Friends of the Earth find common cause is that the planting of crops like Jatropha does need to be monitored. If it’s planted on otherwise unproductive land it could bring real benefit, but at the opposite extreme if rain forests are torn down to make way for it, we’ll al be worse off.



Presenter:



Nils Blythe reporting.



End