Branson bets on biofuel

Virgin pours money into plant oil alternatives - even for aircraft

Richard Branson scooped worldwide headlines in September by committing some $3 billion over ten years to combat global warming. The money will come from the anticipated profits of his Virgin Group’s travel businesses. It’s all part of what Virgin insiders call the Gaia Capitalism Project. And group corporate affairs director Will Whitehorn has told Green Futures that up to half of that $3 billion will be poured into biofuels.

“We want to be the world leader in energy-efficient transportation,” says Whitehorn. In the UK, the Virgin Group’s first practical step in that direction could be on its diesel trains, where plans are afoot to use a mix of 50% biodiesel.

One unexpected hitch has been October’s unseasonally warm weather; the test programme needs some proper winter temperatures to gauge the new fuel’s performance in the cold. But within two years, Virgin expects to invest in a plant for distilling its own biodiesel, preferably close to the company’s Central Rivers train depot near Burton-on-Trent.

Virgin also has a $60 million stake in a US ethanol company which is building its first production facility in California’s Central Valley this autumn. Cilion Inc, co-owned by Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist who co-founded Sun Microsystems, will brew ethanol from maize. The waste will be fed to cattle. The factory is sited near a railhead where maize is already shipped in for cattle feed.

The combination of Branson and climate change concern has provoked predictable accusations of ‘greenwash’. There has been more specific criticism, too, of his enthusiasm for biofuels - from the likes of radical anti-globalisation greenie George Monbiot (at www.turnuptheheat.org.uk). But Iain Watt at Forum for the Future is more positive about the Virgin path. Watt recognises the inherent unsustainability of diverting agricultural land on a massive scale to growing fuel crops. However, he is happier about Virgin’s longer-term emphasis on a switch to cellulosic ethanol. This is a technology which, instead of using maize, sugar, soya or palm oil as a feedstock, converts cellulose retrieved from forestry or farm waste which is too indigestible to be used in human food.

Virgin’s new fuels subsidiary will be working on cellulosic ethanol in the US, and is also looking at cutting-edge R&D opportunities in the UK and Germany for ‘second generation’ biofuels. By Christmas it hopes to announce investment in a patentable technology that could eventually replace kerosene as aviation fuel.

Stringent safety requirements make this a particularly tall order, and even Whitehorn concedes that jet biofuel could be a decade away, while commercially priced cellulosic ethanol is also unlikely for five years. But global warming, he says, “is an urgent situation. And this is the best we’ve got now.” - Ros Davidson

9 November 2006