Plans for the UK's first vegetable oil power plants

Biofuelwatch and the London Food not Fuel group are campaigning against plans for the UK's first vegetable oil power plant. The company Blue NG has applied to Newham LBC for planning permission to build a large CHP plant which could only run on vegetable oil. It would use 56,000 litres per day. They intend to submit seven further similar applicatons throughout the UK. In Germany, there are 1,800 such CHP plants, and the great majority of them run on palm oil, because this is by far the cheapest. Blue NG specifically refer to plans to use palm oil as well as rapeseed oil and jatropha oil in their planning applicaton. Rapeseed oil would be highly problematic, too, because the EU is already a net importer of rapeseed oil, given that 66% of what is produced here is turned into biodiesel. Using rapeseed oil for heat and power will just result in more vegetable oil, inlcuding palm oil being imported.

Furthermore, according to a recent study by nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, burning rapeseed oil is associated with up to 70% more greenhouse gas emissions than burning fossil fuel diesel, because of the high emisssions of nitrous oxide linked to fertiliser use. Plus, it's a disaster for our biodiversity. And jatropha, not yet commercially avaialable, is linked to a major land grab, the displacement of communities and of food production across many countries, including India, Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

There is great concern that planning approval in Beckton could pave the way for large-scale vegetable oil and in particular palm oil burning in CHP in the UK.

For background about the likely impacts of the plant, see www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/files/thames_gateway_biodiesel_project.pdf.

If it goes ahead, it would have very serious impacts on deforestation and thus climate change, on communities in the South, but also on residents in the Beckton area, since vegetable oil burning is associated with high emissions of PM 2.5 and NOx, which pose a serious risk to public health.