And Another Thing II

If you think of the “environment” or let’s take a more specific example, the atmosphere, as a space in which we can store our pollution, the by-products of our consumption, then it’s easy to imagine it as a resource. Like a resource it's finite, keep putting things into the space and one day it will be full.

During this journey from the wealthiest countries in the world (UK, France, Switzerland), to the poorest (Nepal, India), I’ve become more convinced that the way we exploit our environment is just another facet of the global social injustice that has dogged the way this planet is governed since colonial times.

For over a century, richer countries have exploited the earth’s resources, providing a comfortable quality of life for their citizens at a disproportionate cost to the citizens of poorer countries. The exploitation of energy, oil, coal, mineral resources, timber, food crops, cotton, and more, has on the whole benefited the wealthy foreigners exploiting the commodity more than the country whose soil yields it.

So it is with the pollution-storing-environment resource. The beneficiaries who are fully exploiting this resource are the highly consumptive rich nations, who need a lot of rivers, sea, landfills and atmosphere to store the waste their high quality of life produces, and they are getting this globally shared resource for a knock down price. Free.

In the case of space to put the CO2 produced by energy consumption, the US and Europe has had more than 200 years of free rein, burning first their own forests to fuel the industrial revolution, then global coal and now oil reserves. And the situation continues to be exploited unevenly. The quality of each life in the US is using up that storage space over 3 times faster than the quality of each life in India.

And the impact of overusing this CO2 storage will be paid by developing countries. Climate change associated to manmade activities will impact the tropical countries most, where weather patterns are more susceptible to changes, and it will impact agricultural economies that rely on predictable climate to grow crops to feed themselves and earn foreign exchange with which they can give themselves a decent quality of life. Poor developing countries, not by accident, are almost always tropical and agricultural.

“Saving the Environment” is a confusing way of phrasing the problem. Firstly it distances people from the problem. A head teacher in India while congratulating me on this expedition told me “It’s great what you are doing. I love the environment, trees and all that, it would be a shame if we lost it all.” as though the environment is a nice-to-have bonus, something pretty to look at on the drive to work. Secondly it obfuscates the fact that it is humanity that will suffer not the trees. The jet stream will still blow (though no one knows for sure where), clouds will still form at the top of thermal columns of air, wildlife, animals and plants will quietly uncomplainingly adapt, migrate, evolve or die out.

And humans will have to adapt, migrate, evolve or die out too. The ones best suited to adapting and migrating will be the rich ones. The ones without the money or the liberty to move freely around the planet will face the choice between evolving, and where that’s not possible, dying out.

So once again a valuable resource is being disproportionately exploited by people in wealthy nations, leaving a disproportionately high cost for people in poor nations.

I’m becoming more convinced that the mechanism for “Saving the environment” is universally linked to creating global social justice in the world. The two things are mutually dependent. In order to responsibly manage the pollution-storage-space environment there has to be social justice, and managing the environment will prevent social injustice.

Equal education, equal access to healthcare and equal access to global resources. But seeing as we can’t even eradicate poverty in the world I really don’t think we have any chance. Thank god I’m not a poor Indian.

People criticise the environmental credentials of this journey, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. I’m bored of having the same discussions and clarifying confusions about “Biofuels: good or bad?” or “The Environmental Impact of Container Ships”. There’s a bigger point. Living in the UK and especially London, it’s impossible to escape wasteful consumption and being a “valuable member of society” (which actually means working somewhere in the industrialised cycle of turning resources into commodities and delivering them to consumers – and is presumably opposed to being a worthless member of society). By taking to the road and escaping that cycle by living in a truck, I believe, means I am contributing more towards creating a socially just world and therefore helping reduce the CO2 I’m responsible to an even greater degree than the act of running my bus on waste oils. A consumptive lifestyle, complicity with unfair resource exploitation is the root cause of a carbon intensive lifestyle and the fuel I put in my truck is only part of the picture.

In an interview this week I was asked what people can do to help the environment and I said, “I don’t know, they have to figure it out for themselves.” I’m not a role model with easy pithy consumable answers, and if I said they have to quit their jobs, let all their hire-purchase electronics be repossessed, move out of the city and plant tomatoes, most people would understandably think I’m even more of a naive idealist idiot than they already do.

Digital Displacement

Driving through mountains is a huge frustration for me. I use so much fuel going up, and wear out the brakes when going down.

I’ve been thinking that the perfect vehicle for paragliding should have a system of regenerative braking, which turns the energy from braking back into useable energy to push you along and up the hills.

The only way to do this, that I was familiar with, was to use an electric drive train, where the motor on the wheels can be used as a generator which slows the vehicle down and charges the battery.

Many trains have a diesel electric drive train, in which a diesel generator creates the electricity which drives a motor connected to the wheels. This seems like an unnecessarily complicated approach; when you have a diesel engine spinning away, it would seem to be more logical to connect it to the wheels rather than a generator connected to a motor connected to wheels.

In fact diesel-electric is more efficient, because there are less transmission losses (there’s no gearbox) and it allows the diesel engine to run at the speed where it is most efficient. Diesel engines are very inefficient outside a narrow rev range.

So the obvious answer is diesel-electric hybrid truck, or in my case veg-electric hybrid, with regenerative braking. I could take the gearbox out, and attach a generator in its place, then attach a motor to the differential at the back where the drive shaft would be. The Toyota Prius is able to capture and reuse about 50% of the braking energy.

Unfortunately the components required to control and power manage an electric vehicle are hugely expensive, and fitting them is much more complicated than just bolting on some off the shelf parts. But in theory it could improve the efficiency significantly, and I’d love to give it a try, because if there is one thing this bus is missing, it’s efficiency.

Last month Iain got in touch through Facebook and told me about "Digital Displacement" technology which I’d describe as a “diesel-hydraulic” hybrid system. Instead of a generator, a hydraulic pump is attached to the engine. This then creates hydraulic pressure, which can be stored in a pressure tank full of nitrogen or directed to a hydraulic motor attached to the wheels. The clever part of the system, which has been designed by Artemis Intelligent Power in Scotland, is the fast reacting valves that control how the hydraulic pressure is directed. The valves make the motor much more efficient than anything that’s gone before. The system is computer controlled, so that it acts as a variable speed gearbox. The engine always runs at optimum revs for the power required to move the truck along, and the speed is computer controlled by distributing the pressure to the sophisticated drive motor.

But best of all, the flow of pressure can be revered. The motor can be turned into a brake converting the energy from slowing the truck down into hydraulic pressure, which is stored and subsequently used to drive the car again. It’s much more efficient than an electric regenerative system, capturing and reusing 85% of the braking energy, because moving and storing energy at the high rate a braking vehicle generates it, is easier to do with hydraulic pressure than it is with the high currents generated and the batteries of an electrical system.

It’s a system that’s ideal for vehicles in stop-start driving scenarios, and the best energy savings will be on large vehicles, for instance bin-lorries and busses. Currently the technology has been sold to Bosch-Rexroth who will no doubt trial and develop reliable components first for this heavy vehicle market and then hopefully roll it out for smaller vehicles like cars if the energy and cost savings can be shown to be worthwhile.

There are other advantages over diesel-electric too. The components are lighter, and there isn’t the associated environmental impact of battery manufacture and ultra-capacitors burning out.

Using this gearbox on a large saloon car, Artemis have shown certified fuel savings of around 40%. This is one of those rare technologies that make a massive leap forward. In principle it’s a technology that can be retro fitted to any vehicle, especially trucks. I’ve been in touch with Artemis to ask if they have any components I could trial. The answer was an understandably lukewarm no, but I'm going to persist. This is prototype stuff and I suspect they don't have a license for road going vehicles anymore. I’m trying to get hold of people at Bosch to ask them too but I doubt they will want to let me test out the technology at this early stage, when they have everything to lose if prototype components are seen to go wrong.

The energy storage capacity needed to capture the energy of braking when driving down through mountains is much bigger than that for stop-go traffic so I’m still unclear how big the pressure tank would need to be to make the best use from the slow ongoing breaking energy of my 6 tonne truck descending from the Himalayas.

At the very least I hope the next Biotruck, Biotruck III, will be a Veg-Hydraulic hybrid designed for a tour of the world’s mountains.

Beautiful Energy

True beauty only exists in nature. That’s my stance in an ongoing debate with Rachel, an Israeli in Nepal for Buddhist meditation. Being as she’s Israeli, it’s good that we have something other than politics to argue about. Our one foray down that road leads to the whole restaurant stopping to listen to what turns into an aggressive shouting match.

Our friendship survived, only to be jeopardised again when she had the nerve to tell me the bus needs more colour, and proceeded to give me interior design tips. The idea of beautifying the physical manifestation of my philosophy of non-consumption/waste-consumption, with a lick of paint or some wood stain is almost as odious to me as the unfolding news of the Flotilla murders.

Next she accuses me of being a reductionist, incapable of appreciating art. I don’t see that as bad things. The world could do with more reduction. And anyway, I do appreciate art, for the ideas it presents, but not for it’s pure aesthetic as Rachel thinks I should. Its visual beauty is a manmade construct designed to manipulate emotions, and as Magrite said, C’est ne pas une pipe (This is not a pipe, this is a picture of a pipe). The ideas and history of artists and their artwork can be beautiful but how can you find their visual emotional trickery beautiful. Interesting, thought-provoking, but not beautiful.

Mountains are beautiful, and I don’t get to say goodbye to Rachel because she’s gone before I make it back from a stunning mountain trek which, for 3 days, bombards me with beauty. Not just beautiful landscapes, but beautiful ideas that are totally new to me, and ways of living whose functionality is beautiful.

It’s physically draining. My muscles tremble unable to turn my calories into movement strong enough to lift me up the path, or catch me as I descend down it. The unforgiving futility of dropping 400m and having to climb it again to reach a village less than a mile away batters my mental forces, and still my legs step on, sometimes so slowly I wonder if they are taking me anywhere.

I’ve never known a remoteness like this. My concept of time and distance can’t adjust to the world not being flat. I look at my map, and although the next village is close it could be hours away. The journey could more usefully be measured in terms of exhaustion rather than time, or by how much daylight will be left when we arrive, or by how much rain or sun we’ll get along the way, or how many rests the route will demand.

The second day is 8 hours of trekking, about the same journey time from central Rome to the centre of Milan by car. Walking on flat land you might cover 40km in that time. We finish the day 10km from where we started. Our first stop for rest is an hour into the day. I regain my breath as the sweat grows cold on my back. This would be the outskirts of Rome, motorway driving from here on, time to settle back after the aggression of driving through Roman traffic, set the music up for the journey, maybe a moment to stop for a cup of coffee or coke to fondle and keep me company.

As the crow, and rescue helicopter, flies, we’re never far from “civilisation” but the only way to get there for me is time and energy. I watch the eagles hovering perfectly still in the blustery ridge lift searching out a mouse or gecko on the ground, and dream of how much easier it would be to climb and traverse with a paraglider. Our 8 hour day could be done in 30 minutes with the right winds and an area flat and big enough to land.

There are no areas big enough to land. The only horizontal surfaces are the terracing, but they are so steep that the fields are tiny, barely big enough to lay a wing out, let alone land it. The work to make the terraces, drag a plough around them and move the plough and ox to the next one screams at me through the landscapes graceful tranquillity.

There are no internal combustion machines. It would take more work to get the fuel to them, than whatever work they could do. I’ve been to remote places in the Sahara, places that take days to reach, places that aren’t on the way to anywhere else, places so isolated that people have been transfixed, by my white skin and, in turn afraid then reduced to fits of laughter by my hairy arms and legs. But the difference is that here the remoteness is created not by distance but by difficulty.

The inconvenience of Gandruk and Goripani has created an infrastructure dependent on human and animal power because none of the alternatives we’ve invented are of any use here. It’s an infrastructure that totally sidesteps the things I am familiar with, roads, petrol stations, supermarkets. And it’s really good. It really works. It’s not full of compromises or cop-outs like most alternatives to the industrialised world. The whole way along the route people seem content. I’m sure it’s not utopia, but people are happy.

I’m accustomed to work, effort and labouring being the enemy, and conditioned to work, effort and labour only as much as necessary in order to avoid more work, effort and labour. Along the trek I see everything in terms of the energy it took to create with horror filled eyes. The natural forces that formed these mountains are countered by the forces of men that carried and laid the stone slabs making this never ending path, or by the strength of the mules that carried up the cement for the houses.

My morning maize porridge stares back at me politely reminding me of the effort to plough a field, harvest maize, grind it into flour, then collect wood and chop it for the fire to boil it into porridge. It’s full of calories in so many ways. Slowly my horror turns to the sort of respect that demands emulation, but my body doesn’t yet acclimatise to the pace.

We all have a base level of how physical our lifestyles require us to be, and this must be one of the most demanding corners of the world, but just like anywhere else, the kids play jokes and run up and down the path after each other on the walk to and from school.

They have electricity in places, created locally by small hydro-electric generators, and distributed by steel cables hauled up the mountainside and strung from small but heavy pylons, before being tightened by hand. Occasionally I see small solar PV panels, big enough to charge a radio or torches.

The last hour of the walk back to Birethanti is along 3km of roadworks. They are carving a road into the mountain. We time our run past a JCB on the cliff overhead to avoid the falling rocks and shale. Last month a local man was killed here. Carving a road through any landscape is an environmental holocaust; and in this landscape the destruction per mile is so much higher. It’s a thought that keeps me entertained when I am bouncing the bus over some shitty track, cursing the corrupt politicians for not having built a road yet.

It’s easy to be judgemental about road building, but roads bring healthcare, cheaper supplies and better profits for rural farmers. You can’t begrudge remote communities that. My magnanimity is made easier safe in the knowledge that there is no way man will ever be able to construct a road to Gandruk or Goripani. A thought, which along with the mountains that surround them, and the way of life there, is beautiful.

The Cost of Failure

If you make 1000 one inch widgets in your widget-making factory, they won’t all be one inch long. Some will come out longer, and some will be shorter. There’s a natural statistical variation which if your widget making machines are in good condition, and run by well trained widget-makers will be quite a small variation, or if you are a British manufacturer from the 70’s and 80’s the variation will be massive and that’s why no one bought the lazy crap you made.
The British idea of quality was to make your widgets within a certain tolerance, no bigger than so much, and no smaller than so much. The Japanese realised that only striving for perfection was good enough.

A Japanese Engineer/Philosopher (I can’t remember his name and have a mental block with it being Tamagochi, that’s not it but it’s the best I can do) came up with the idea of measuring the cost of failure caused by a widget not being the perfect size. Once the widget is installed in the machine, and it fails, there is the cost of lost working time, the cost of the repair labour, and finally the cost of the replacement widget. He multiplied that by the probability of his widgets failing before their designed lifespan, and he realised the cost of failure is always disproportionately more than the cost of investing in the process to make the widgets better. I vaguely remember an amazing formula to calculate C.o.F for any widget you might want to make. On that basis he came to the conclusion that it was no less than immoral (his words, albeit in Japanese) to make any widget a size other than the exact size they are supposed to be.

That was in the 1970’s, by the 80’s the Japanese were producing the best products in the world, and by the 90’s everyone in the world knew the Japanese were producing the best products in the world and were desperately trying to understand and copy what and how the Japanese were doing; including getting hairy-arsed Geordie fitters to do Tai Chi at the start of the day on the assembly line. WTF?

I’d been thinking about the Cost of Failure after my engine rebuild. The pistons and the liners are pretty simple parts, and comparatively cheap, but the work required to replace them is disproportionate. Its not a fair comparison because the truck is 21 years old, so they have already outlived their designed lifespan.

But this was in the back of my mind when Ravitej, the CEO of Mago Construction who contacted me out of the blue to help keep the expedition on the road with sponsorship cash, was talking about how sustainable energy infrastructure may be expensive, but the eventual financial cost of not going down that path was much higher.

Lord Stern from the London School of Economics has produced a world renown paper which looks at the financial cost of climate change, compared with the cost of implementing solutions now to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Needless to say it’s much cheaper to deal with it now before it becomes massive.

But the reality is that the pre-emptive cost would have to be paid primarily by the developed, industrialised nations, whereas the picking-up-the-pieces payments would come from the pockets of developing nations.

This is the same issue Tamagochi faced, in that the cost of producing better widgets is borne by the widget maker whereas the cost of repairing a machine with a broken widget is paid by the widget buyer.

However what made Tamagochi a 1970s visionary was that he saw that the widget buyer the widget maker lived in a metaphorical symbiotic Buddhist temple together and swam in the same sea hunting for prawns as the sun set (my words – I doubt he ever said anything like that, not even in Japanese). Basically the relationship between producer and buyer is tied, so it’s in everybody’s interest to minimise the failure. There are no winners when the widget breaks.

The cost of developing nations struggling with climate change will be evetually be borne out by all nations, directly through increased aid, but indirectly in so many more and expensive ways.

InteGreater

As an engineering student we had to design mechanisms that change one input into another output. The teacher called them black box problems. You have a spinning rod going into the black box, design a mechanism that will make the output rod reciprocate (move back and forth) – the answer is a crank.

The idea stuck with me that the role of an engineer is to isolate the users of their creations, from how they work. And in the last 30 years through the boom of manufacturing methods, materials, tighter tolerances and improved quality they’ve become very good at it.

Turn a key in a modern car and it starts. You don’t need to know about the ECU, signal bus, MTTF of the switch mechanism e.t.c. As artefacts have become more sophisticated, so they have become more like mysterious black boxes.

This also means that as a consumer of artefacts, it’s very hard to know, not just what’s in them but how they have been made and the impact they’ve had during their production.

Kaylan from Bangalore has a few ideas on how to change that. After quitting his business consultancy job a few years back he set off to explore India, living frugally and working manual jobs as he went. In India, dropping out of the rat race like this is unheard of.

Thanks to his experience on the journey and also his business management knowledge, he’s designed a set of principles which he wants to apply to retailing, taking the idea of fair trade a step forward. For instance the price tags will have a breakdown of exactly how much goes to everyone in the chain of production, transport and retailing and the shop will be staffed by disabled clerks. These are just a couple of the ideas that “I-Create” has. I share with him my idea that food should be sold next to screens that have live feeds to the farms and factories where they are processed. Imagine choosing battery framed eggs if they are next to video image of a battery farm hatchery.

But these are just a few of the idea for his approach to retailing. He’s also about to start work on his a village development project, Proto-Village, which I think has some really positive benefits over traditional NGO principles.

Firstly the goal is sufficiency, not development; to get the village to a place where they have enough, sufficiency, not growth at all costs.

Secondly it’s a finite project with a timeframe. Most NGO’s have a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they work on. If they drip feed a solution, the problem is still then the following year when they have to beg for funding, Solve the problem once and for all, then the need for the NGO’s existence goes away. The “Proto-village” scheme will be around for 15 years. At the end, if the team have succeeded or not, it will wind up. Again, it’s a nice alternative to the goal orientated approach, which doesn’t always work in the development field for so many reasons.

Kaylan is looking for volunteers to help with the project. They need to have expertise in one of 9 areas which include economics, welfare and education. Experts will spend 5 months in the village understanding how it works, drawing out solutions from the villagers, and applying expertise and access to funding so village life can be improved where it is insufficient.

People interested in opening the black box should visit www.integreater.org

Not Long Enough to Drink the Water

The Union Carbide plant isn’t hard to find, everyone in Bhopal I ask for direction knows where it is. From the entrance it could be the entrance to a rundown city park. Four police officers lounge by the gate and explain that without a permit I can’t enter. Ten minutes later I’ve put 200Rs in an officer’s hand (at his suggestion), he’s pulled on a shirt and he’s doctoring the date on an old permit as we walk into the restricted area.

We pass functional low rise office blocks now abandoned with broken windows and a film of grey city dirt engrained in the plaster. Then, above the thin tree growth I can see the rusting scaffold of a chemical plant being reclaimed by nature, slowly strangled by lianas, trees and bushels.

When arriving in the city I’d half expected there to be an operating plant on the site, with a visitors centre and a PR department extolling the virtues of how safe the plant is now, and how the cleanup has been a big success. A sign of how I misjudged the scale of what happened here in 1984 and the anger that still exists at the injustice that persists. It’s well documented but it’s worth repeating the details lest they get forgotten.

Due to lazy maintenance, and miserly cost cutting, the plant erupted, as a series of easily avoidable equipment failures compounded to release enormous volumes of the active ingredient used in the pesticides that were being made there. The people of Bhopal were “treated” like a plague of locusts.

Union Carbide shirked full responsibility and the court cases continue to this day in the US and in India 25 years later. UC was sold to Dow Chemicals who have denied ongoing liability. Some compensation has been paid but nothing compared to the medical or socio-economic damage the accident caused.

As an engineer I felt it was important to see the mechanics of how the accident happened. The refinery was ravaged by fire and now a quarter of a century later the metal work is rusting and starting to collapse in places. There's little evidence left to how it all started.

The 3 tanks that contained the toxic gas that was emitted each sit not far from where they exploded. The first calmly rests on the ground 20 metres away from its original placement, it’s exposed flanges of shinny stainless steel are unaffected by the fire or the passage of time. The second tank has been housed in a makeshift hanger; presumably to avoid exposing it to rain that might washout the final traces of toxic sludge. The hanger doesn’t look as if it’s seen any maintenance since the clean up in 1985. It’s sagging and cracked.

The final tank was deemed to contain such a volume and concentration of toxins that it was decided that rather than transport it away or chemically treat it in place, the safest option was to bury it next to the hanger in a concrete coffin.

However after 25 monsoons, the poison from the disaster has still not been washed away, and in fact the moving earth caused by the rains around the concrete bunker is giving life to the deadly poison again. The concrete casing is clearly falling apart above the surface, and any civil engineer will tell you the same thing is likely to be happening below it. Forces strong enough to break concrete can bend, fold and crack the steel tank encased in it. In the rainy season, water will leach through the cracks washing the poison down into the water table 200m below.

Less than 100m away from where the 3 tanks sit, is a shanty town butting up against the 2 metre walls of the abandoned complex. The land slopes, and the water table runs, in the direction of the shanty, and the inhabitants have few options but to drink the water from ground wells.

Its little surprise then that even today the Sambhavna clinic, run exclusively for patients with ailments relating to disaster, and funded by charitable donations from the UK and US, still sees 150 patients a day, and have over 24,000 registered. Respiratory problems, caused by the release of the gas now rival eye, skin, liver and kidney damage caused by the affected water supply. The clinic also deals with, diabetes, cancer and children born with birth defects, all of which are at a much higher incidence in Bhopal than elsewhere in India.

The local government now delivers water from outside the affected area to bauwsers on the streets, but they aren’t replenished rapidly enough. Inhabitants jockey to fill cans as soon as the water trucks have passed, but are also forced to resort to the ground water pumps that should have been shut off.

In a city of 1 million, over half have had compensation claims accepted. The amount paid out is trifling compared to the impact. Victims have received between US$500 to €2000 for the most severely affected. A figure described as “Plenty good for an Indian” by a US executive of the company.

Goats, cows and wild boar graze on the site, and kids step through the cracked brick wall to play cricket in the clearings. The government say the site is clean and want to open it as a tourist attraction.

But there's no independent monitoring of the cleanup operation conducted by the Indian government with a one time payment made by UC and seemingly no maintenance of the cleanup. A report in December '09 by the Indian Centre for Science and Environment’s Pollution Monitoring Laboratory found 38 times the normal level of pesticide in the ground water 3km away from the plant. In the site itself they found pesticide concentrations in the soil is 9,866ppm. That means 1% of the chemical composition of the soil is pesticide.

Activists from the Bhopal Group for Information and Actions (BGIA) are in Delhi this week to lobby the government to stand by its commitment made in 2008 to set up the Empower Commission, to be run by an established victims group. The Commission is due to manage a budget of US$400m over 30 years. All six relevant government departments have agreed the plan, the only stumbling block is the local Madhya Pradesh government who see an opportunity in distributing the funds and want to manage it themselves, but, say the BGIA, have shown little in the way of track record of supporting the victims over the last 25 years.

In amongst all this wrangling to spend government money it’s easy to get distracted from the fact this was an accident caused by negligence, with massive consequences. As individuals, it’s too easy to be negligent, and most of the time it causes little or no repercussions, but as a corporation Union Carbide, now Dow, had an obligation to put systems in place to forcibly prevent negligence. More than reminding employees to keep on their toes, they should have had a management system and technical systems that made negligence impossible. The courts are deciding if they did enough in this respect.

Corporations working in the developing world are doing so because it’s cheaper. It’s cheaper because space and resources are cheaper, but the big saving is workforce and freer operating legislation. That’s MBA double-speak for lower skilled people working in less safe environments. Union Carbides' defence against negligence was that the Indian government didn't have sufficient safety standards. Standards which would have made it more expensive to opperate the plant. The lack of standards made the need for UC to negligence-proof thier opperation all the more important.

Dow, as with any quoted corporation, has a "responsibility to its shareholders". All those hardworking middle class savers and investors around the world, who knowingly or not have put their money and financial expectations in the portfolios and funds that contain Dow stock. Even if Dow were to put their hands up and pay out, (which ethically there is no doubt they should), it's the shareholders and not those who made the decisions that led to the negligence who'll be stumping up the corn.

Warren Anderson the American CEO of UC legged it to the US skipping $2000 bial, and has fought extradition to India ever since. After Enron and Madoff, the anger of America’s middle class 501 losers has encouraged the judiciary there to convict senior management to long prison terms for company crimes that they actively orchestrated. Corporate negligence is different from corporate corruption but the climate now exists to apportion blame the top management. Perhaps the fact the Bhopal trial has run so long, into this era where CEOs can't shirk their corporate responsibilities, will mean due punishment will be dispensed in the US to Warren Anderson, and the management team who allowed this negligence to take place. Or perhaps it will procrastinate further beyond the lifetimes of the survivors and the perpetrators.

Gomti Biofuel

I’ve already blogged about Jatropha and that India is supposedly the world’s Jatropha garden. I really believe in the Jatropha concept, so it was with a heavy heart that I have given up looking for Jatropha oil after contacting the only people in the country who are producing oil. They told me their product is at such a premium it costs $1500/tonne.

Nothing in India is a fixed price so I dare say I should have haggled a bit, but even so, that works out at about $1.70/litre which is nuts when you think Diesel is $0.60. How is that ever going to make an economic biodiesel? They tell me it’s only used for research at the moment; bought up by producers at a premium price to experiment with.

Sounds like crap to me. The expertise for turning Jatropha oil into biodiesel has been known for a long time now. The challenge is how to grow it efficiently. Varieties/strains/crop rotation/land resting e.t.c. so that plantations can produce good yields with low levels of irrigation on marginal land.

Turns out that over the last 4-5 years since people started talking about Jatropha there’s been millions of dollars used to buy up land rights for growing the crops, but no one has done the unglamorous (and un-venture-capitalist-funded) work of actually developing varieties and production practices. The money-go-round fell apart just over a year ago when D1 Oils, one of the biggest players in securing Jatropha land rights went bust. Despite having the paper capacity to produce massive amounts of oil they only seem to have produced a couple of thousand litres that have sat in a warehouse in Tyneside since 2007. I was offered it for this trip at one point.

D1 are now back and smaller and focussing on researching the agricultural techniques needed to get good production from Jatropha. It’s a plant that takes 5 years to start bearing fruit so it’s a long research process.

In the meantime I have struck really lucky in my quest for waste power. At the Indian border a very enthusiastic entrepreneur called Rocky and his family excitedly ask for a tour around the bus. He tells me there is a man in his town of Haldwani who makes biodiesel and I should come and visit.

I do, and Sanjeev of Gomti Biotech explains the amazing process he’s developed to extract oil from the waste products produced by a vegetable oil manufacturer. The waste looks like oily mud and Sanjeev uses his own patented system of solvent extraction to get 20% of it back as oil which makes the then uses to make great biodiesel. It’s a similar process to extracting oil from sewer grease and trap grease.

The fuel is a blend of Soya waste and Mustard waste so it should stay nice and runny even in the cold Haldwani winters. It’s quite dark and it smells pretty odd. Gomti sell their fuel at 3 local filling stations, and people buy it because it’s cheaper, and has a higher octane rating than normal diesel. There’s no pretence at being green here, but actually this process seems really green to me, and could help the fundamental problem faced by Indian Biodiesel producers that there isn’t any waste oil feedstock and many suppliers are making bio from imported palm oil.

Gomti’s fuel has cleared out my fuel starvation problem, which leads me to think it was probably caused by sludge in the bottom of the tank of the Iranian soya oil. I only had a couple of hundred litres left by the time I topped up with 400 litres from Gomti, and their fuel has probably diluted the sludgy remains and the bus is flying along at 80km/h again.

Iranian State Sponsored Bus

The fundamental idea behind Biofuels is that, unlike fossil fuels, the carbon they release when they are used is carbon that was already in the atmosphere. Nothing new is being added. Fossil fuels on the other hand require digging carbon atoms out of the ground in the form of crude oil and burning them releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

All well and good in theory but there 3 major problems that biofuels have to overcome to really work on an environmental level.

Firstly growing massive amounts of oil producing crops to meet the planets fuel needs is practically impossible, and unsustainable agricultural practices in places like Malaysia and the Amazon mean that rainforests are being felled to grow palm and soya for oil. Obviously this is completely counterproductive from a CO2 point of view and environmentally worthless, but it is cheap, and does tick the boxes governments have set out for “green” fuel producers. This crappy legislation is responsible for biofuels with a higher carbon footprint than diesel, which by the way, I can’t help referring to as “the good stuff” much to my own annoyance.

Secondly growing biofuels means there is less space left to grow food crops. Biofuel crops account for a tiny portion of the land that could be used to grow food, however food prices are dependent on the balance between how much food is produced and how much food is consumed. If there is a tiny bit more food available, then food is cheap, but if there is a tiny bit less, then food becomes dramatically more expensive. Agrofuels have been credited with sending food production below this tipping point and sending crop prices sky high.

Then there is a third problem which is that producing biofuels takes energy, and requires a small but not negligible quantity of chemicals which are mainly produced as by products of the petrochemical industry.

The first two problems can be solved in a number of ways. The key thing is proper legislation that rewards sustainably grown fuels with a traceable feedstock. Oil producers say this is too complicated because of the way fuel is blended before being sold. Crap. You can buy sustainable electricity that is “blended” in the National Grid so why not fuel from a big blending tank. The Renewable Fuels Agency in the UK is working on improving the UK legislation.

You can also use waste oils, of which there aren’t a huge amount, certainly when compared with the fuel need, but the right legislation (like that in the UK) has encouraged a very efficient network of recycling of waste oil by individuals and companies. Certainly there is no excuse for waste oil going to waste. And new ideas on sources of waste are being developed and pushed as commercial projects in the quest to meet demand. Uptown Oils one of my sponsors are working with sewer grease which has to be scraped out of the drains to free up pipes. In China they are already using the same technology to recover grease from restaurants on a massive scale.

There are so called second generation crops, which are showing promising signs of providing solutions. Jatropha is a desert flower whose seed produces oil and it grows in arid conditions where food crops can’t be grown. MFC in Mali are doing research work to see how yields can be improved with crop rotation, resting the land and cross breeding varieties.

There is also a lot of work going on with vertical Algae growing. Algae produce huge amounts of oil, per hectare of land (or moreover water) compared with traditional oil crops. It can be fed with sewerage, or it can even be grown at sea. The difficult bit is extracting the oil from the Algae, but again new techniques are being pioneered as we speak.

The third problem which doesn’t get talked about much, rests on the fact that planet Earth has a fossil fuelled infrastructure. Ethanol is an important ingredient in making biodiesel. There are bioethanols available, but not widely, and the transport footprint becomes a factor for producers that want to use it, let alone the cost.

In London Uptown Oils wanted to power their processors with generators running on the biodiesel they produce from restaurant waste oil, but they would need special permits as it’s classed as “waste incineration”. Aside from the mad bureaucracy, sustainable energy can be used to produce biofuels, if it’s cheap and available.

Here in Tehran, I have drawn a blank on finding waste oil. We found a broker that sold waste oil from chips factories to soup makers, for 80cents/litre. 1000 litres would cost $800, cheaper than fuel in the UK, but a lot more than my shoe string budget could afford, and a lot more expensive than filling the tank with Iranian Good Stuff (which would cost about ten quid!). Regardless it was the wrong sort of oil, too lardy and dirty. The next best option was to use fresh oil, and an Iranian environmental NGO persuaded a local cooking oil producer to provide 900litres of fresh but unprocessed oil. It has been extracted from soya beans, but not filtered, bleached or neutralised, so isn’t fit for cooking. The best thing about it is that I can now say that the expedition is (sort of) Iranian State Sponsored because the NGO that lobbied on my behalf is part funded by the government. I shan’t mention it to US Immigration.

I’m disappointed it’s not waste, but after a week of chasing my tail, I have to make a compromise. At least it’s not diesel, and this is after all a vegetable oil producing nation. I now have enough fuel to get to India where I hope to find some Jatropha.

Buyuk Kolej

This encounter really inspired me. Aybuke, Ece and Neva, three girls from the college read an article in National Geographic Magazine about biodiesel, and persuaded their college to support them in a scheme they devised to collect used cooking oil from their canteen for Albiyobir, a local biodiesel producer.

They expanded the scheme so pupils could bring their used cooking oil from home into school too, and expanded it again for the homes in the neighbourhood to deposit their used oil at the school.

Then they went to a number of conferences and got another 70 schools to do the same thing, not just in Turkey, but internationally.

The girls have now graduated from the high school and are at university (studying law and engineering). They came back as part of a special presentation to give me some oil and told me all about the oil collection project, and the education programme that went with it, in faultless English, and left me in awe at how competent these 19 year olds are. They are now working their magic on their universities to collect oil from there too.

And to prove that they really know their stuff, they presented me with a gift of kitchen roll. Anyone that has collected oil knows the value of kitchen roll. These guys are for real. I love the thought process they must have gone through; He’s collecting veg oil around the world? That guy’s going to need some paper towels!

Credit for the project also goes to Elvan, one of their teachers who supported them. My thanks go to all the staff at Buyuk Koleje who made me feel very welcome and to everyone that collected oil for the bus.

Photos in the Gallery.

Next I am headed to the University in Konya, which has a Biodiesel Institute, where I think I’ve been asked to give a lecture!