South West Life

Darryl Butcher is a Bunbury guy who’s clearly made good.

Like many big business arrangements, there are a lot of factors that decide how and where you actually realise the dream, and it’s a testament to his faith in the Southwest that in the face of some very stiff competition, Australian Renewable Fuels still managed to build their second bio diesel plant in Picton.

Darryl is an Organic Chemist and process consultant, who is managing director of Australian Renewable Fuels, a company who have spent a considerable amount of time and money developing the idea of biodiesel for the Australian market.  Yep, trucks, tractors, even power stations can be run on animal fats and oils from vegetables and grains.

Bio diesel is not a new idea, in fact when Rudolf Diesel formulated the technology for his revolutionary engine, he had vegetable oils in mind.  The peanut was one place it could have come from, but then mineral oils were discovered and refined, and it became clear it would be cheaper to dig oil from the earth than grow it in either animal or vegetable form.

A hundred and some years later, mineral oils have presented with their own set of problems.  Global warming is a genuine problem requiring massive action, scarcity suggests that we’ll eventually run out of the stuff, and petroleum politics seem to have delivered some very bloody outcomes that might conceivably end our access to the oil we’ve been finding underground.

So the original gets revisited, can we run the world on vegetable oil?  Chances are that we just can’t.  Sitting in the office of Lorin Sole, site manager for Australian Renewable Fuels in Picton, I asked that question.  Lorin sees that the fuel that comes from vegetable products and tallow (which is waste from abattoirs) could replace an amazing amount of fossil oil diesel, but he doubts it could ever meet our entire needs.  When it all lines up with ethanol, tidal power, solar energy, wind turbines and the like, we have in our hands the means to make a very different future.  I give Lorin plenty of leads so that he can claim that bio diesel will save the planet, and he remains surprisingly even handed.  While he sees it as a given that the use of bio diesel is a better outcome for the environment than continued use of fossil fuels, he also notes that the exact gains are unclear, and even if we were to grow our own fuel oils from say, canola, there are effects from putting land out to agriculture that might not be used that way now.

There’s some clarity that the 19 people employed at the plant from around the South West are better off, and here we get some fair claims.  It’s obvious to all concerned that importing oil doesn’t help our farmers the way paying a farmer to grow it and a crushing company to process it does.

Interestingly, Lorin’s main interest is to be clear with me that it’s a good fuel, and it can be made at a competitive price.  As a natural solvent it actually cleans the gunge from engines run on mineral diesel.  It can be used to reduce smoke, and noise, and as an extra feelgood factor, following a truck running on biodiesel will probably smell like food (if it’s made from tallow you’d think you were following mum’s roast home).

The plant in Picton is neat and looks very good in an industrial plant kind of way.  It’s much smaller than I’d have expected.  There has been significant funding assistance from governments, and the Australian Renewable Fuels group of companies has gone to the stock market and raised a bunch of private dollars to make it happen.

Biodiesel is coming out of both the South Australian plant, and of course Picton. Lorin can point within a 5 km radius to a number of diesel consumers who could combine to take their whole 44 million litre a year output if the decisions went that way, so there’s every cause for confidence.

In the face of the confidence there remains a fly in the ointment and that’s put the plant on reduced output in recent months.  The federal government pays a rebate of anywhere from 18 to 38 cents per litre for diesel to certain users.  A recent change to the regulations for that rebate have meant that it’s payable to fossil fuel users but not to bio diesel users.  Imagine you’re talking about purchasing 5 million litres of diesel in a year, this change has meant that if you use biodiesel you’ll be at least $1 million / year worse off.  It’s severely curtailed purchase, and therefore production of the biodiesel.

Lorin is confident that he’s making the right product in the right way.  He’s sure that the venture is good for the planet and the national economy.  He’s had good relationships with government to date, and he’s really confident that the hiccup is being worked out.  We just like the idea that locals are getting work, farmers have a future and the next truck we follow home might smell like fish and chips.