On “Green” Fuel

This does sound too good to be true, but I have checked it on various sites and it does seem correct. Audi, the German car maker, has succeeded in making a form of artificial diesel that will run cars from a) renewable energy, b) water and c) carbon dioxide harvested from the atmosphere.

This would be the cleanest, greenest fuel imaginable. The renewable energy is used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The latter is mixed with carbon monoxide, which is derived from that harnessed carbon dioxide. You end up with long-chain hydrocarbons that form the so-called “blue crude” diesel.

Production is limited at the research facility in Dresden, but the fuel is already being used to run an Audi car owned by Germany’s minister of education and research, the regrettably named Johanna Wanka.

Yes really. She does exist – I looked her up. The announcement from Audi does not appear to have an April 1 dateline, so this is not some elaborate Teutonic joke. The fuel is said to be even more efficient than conventional fossil hydrocarbons. It is also claimed it can be produced cheaper than the same. So you can burn you way around the countryside content in the knowledge that you are actually reducing CO2 in the atmosphere rather than contributing to it.

Expect this one to be picked up by our papers fairly soon as the solution to all our problems. Expect the usual radical Greens to come up with a reason why it would be a Bad Idea and we would still be better off living in freezing yurts..

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On fracking, and economic lunacy

Some comments to The Guardian, where else, by Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, should not go unnoticed. For Ms Lucas, the problem with fracking to produce shale gas in the UK is not earthquakes, contamination, etc, the main concerns opponents raise. No she says, in reported speech but presumably accurately, it is possible that stringent regulations could minimise those risks. “It’s not that fracking itself is necessarily worse than ordinary gas extraction.”

Instead, it is the mere fact, my paraphrase, that we are about to start a new method to produce fossil fuels.

Lucas accepts we do need gas to tide us over until the brave new world arrives when we can access our entire energy needs from renewables. (A date which gets no closer as the years pass – better to rely on nuclear fusion, which remains equally obstinately out of reach.)

She would prefer to keep importing the stuff from Norway because it would be easier to stop doing so than shut off our own cheaper indigenous supplies. This really is the economics of the madhouse.