Hawker Beechcraft King Air 350

When it comes to planes, I've only got one rule - avoid getting into anything small with propellers. That rule had to be broken yesterday in order to make the trip north from Stockholm to see Sweden's pioneering second-generation bioethanol plant - about which, more later.


Actually, as I discovered from a quick bit of web research once I was safely back on the ground, I shouldn't have worried because, as small planes go, the twin turboprop Beechcraft King Air 350 is a serious piece of equipment. Before take-off, I asked the pilot whether we would be flying at a lower altitude than commercial airliners and to my surprise, he said 'not really'. When I checked later, I found that the King Air 350 will indeed go all the way to 35,000 ft because it has a pressurised cabin. The take-off performance seemed pretty good as well.

That said, the King Air felt a bit small inside, and it did pitch around a bit when we hit turbulence - at one stage on the approach to Stockholm on the return journey, the entire contents of my teacup jumped across the cabin onto Ford's PR man, who, it has to be said, accepted this unwelcome development with commendable equanimity. All in all, though, a great trip that provided wonderful views of Sweden's lakes and forests on a beautiful clear day.

Al Gore has been criticised and even ridiculed for flying the world in a private jet to promote the message of his film about the dangers of global warming An Inconvenient Truth. I did wonder whether flying in a private plane to report on a bioethanol plant isn't similarly objectionable. Perhaps - but activities aimed at getting across the important message about climate change and the possibilities for a low-CO2 future probably count among the better uses of scarce fossil fuels.

Blast from the past 7 - 'Ursaab'

Just getting ready to go to Sweden tomorrow, and this has put me in a Swedish sort of mood.

So here's the most Swedish of cars, the so-called 'Ursaab' of 1946. I think the prefix 'Ur' plays the same role in Swedish as it does in German; it's difficult to translate but in German, at least, it usually denotes that anything to which it is applied is very old, or a true original. That contraption that looks like a park bench with bicycle wheels that Mercedes claims was the first proper car, for example, is sometimes called the 'Ur-Benz'.

Anyway - back to the Ursaab. Project 92 was the first Saab passenger car and was developed over the years into the 93, 95 and 96 lines, which only finally bowed out in 1980.


Nobody could accuse this Saab of being a re-skinned Vauxhall - in those days, the design teams leant on Saab's aircraft experts for ideas rather than Opel, a fact that shows in the remarkable purity of the Ursaab's sleek bodywork. But let's not be too harsh on today's models for their part-sharing; Saab was always a small company before it was taken over by GM, and despite its distinctive identity, it often relied on links with other manufacturers to keep going. In 1966, when the two-stroke engine fitted to the 95 and 96 needed to be replaced, Saab bought in a V4 four-stroke from the German end of Ford. A little later, it asked Triumph to design the overhead-cam engine for the 99; this power unit, related to that fitted to the Dolomite, survived in heavily developed form until comparatively recently. And in the 1980s, the 9000 was the result of a joint development effort that also produced the Fiat Croma, Alfa 164 and Lancia Thema.

So Saabs have never really been quite the pure thoroughbreds some of us might like to imagine - but it would still be nice if they could recover a bit more of their former individuality.

Bioethanol and the Road to Sustainable Development

A fascinating day-long seminar on this subject at London's Imperial College today - I'm grateful to Saab for putting me on to this.

Several contributors from government, the private sector and the academic world explained the role of bioethanol in tackling climate change and future fossil fuel shortages. I can't possibly do all of the arguments justice here but I've picked out what I think are a few of the most interesting aspects.

The first thing you notice at any event on this subject is that a lot of the speakers are Swedes. That's because Sweden has aggressively embraced bio-fuels - the Swedish prime minister declared that the country would be independent of oil would by 2020, although it was a car dealer that got the ball rolling by importing suitably specced American Ford Tauruses in the nineties. This gave Ford an early lead that it was able to build on with bio-capable versions of the Focus produced in Europe. Saab is the other main player with the BioPower versions of its 9-3 and 9-5 models, while Scania has been promoting the use of bioethanol in bus and truck engines that operate on diesel principles. One of the best customers for buses running on bioethanol has been Stockholm's public transport company; buses with Scania's third generation ethanol engine - which should equip it to tackle longer out-of-town journeys - are eagerly awaited there. A Scania bioethanol bus trial is imminent in London too. Not every lesson from Sweden can be applied here, of course. The country has a low population density and a large forestry industry, for example, although I was slightly surprised to learn that the Swedish market uses bioethanol from Brazilian sugar cane (Brazil is the other trailblazer in the use of bio-fuels). I had thought the feedstock for Swedish bioethanol production was cellulose derived from the timber industry; this is however, expected to play a large role in future. Nevertheless, the Swedes' efforts put those of most other countries to shame.

An interesting snippet of information came from a representative of OKQ8, a fuel retailer with a 27% market share in petrol and a 40% share in bioethanol in Sweden - while flex-fuel cars that can run on E85 (a blend of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol) get all the headlines, most of the use of bioethanol in cars in Sweden so far is accounted for by the small amount of bioethanol - 5% - that is added in to standard unleaded; this blend can be used by cars without modification. Bioethanol can already be added to standard unleaded in the UK I believe, and the forthcoming Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) will require us to be 5% renewable by 2010.

Another important point is that different sorts of bio-fuels are not all equally beneficial in their impact. Thanks to the work of academics like Dr Jeremy Woods at Imperial we seem to be getting a better understanding of the differences between so-called 'bad bioethanol' and 'good bioethanol', which is a function of a host of factors such as the crops used, the processes used and the extent to which fossil fuels are used in production and distribution. The UK RTFO can't stipulate that only good bioethanol be used as this would be against world trade rules. However, companies will have to document the provenance of their fuels under RTFO, and it will be up to us to keep them honest with our fuel buying decisions.