As part of the its work in agricultural development, the Council has been involved in discussions with other local authorities and agencies in the North and East of Scotland to explore the possibility of using oil produced locally from oil-seed rape to make biodiesel for transport use. The Scottish Agricultural College was commissioned to report on the feasibility of setting up a rape-seed crushing plant and biodiesel production facility in the North or East of Scotland.
The report identifies a number of key issues which require to be addressed before any production infrastructure could be developed with confidence and the partners are inviting feedback from stakeholders over the next three months. The study is expected to stimulate extensive discussion in the agricultural, fuel and associated industry sectors, particularly as Scotland has potential to produce oilseeds with a high oil content, but farmers lose significant value of their crop due to the transport costs to processing plants in England or overseas.
Commenting on the report’s publication, Cllr Ian Ross, Chairman of Highland Council’s Sustainable Development Select Committee said:
“Highland Council firmly believes that we all need to do much more to reduce our fossil fuel consumption and biodiesel could play an important part in this. Due to the nature of The Highlands we are more dependent on diesel fuels for both transport and heating than many other parts of Scotland and one benefit of biodiesel is that in most situations it can be used by existing vehicles with no need for engine modification.
“We’ve known for some time that there is nothing technically difficult about producing biodiesel from oil-seed rape but until now nobody had looked closely at the economic feasibility of using local sources of oil-seed rape to produce biodiesel in the North of Scotland.
“This is a very full report which raises a number of detailed issues and we will be taking a close look at some of these before meeting back with our other partners in this study to discuss what the next step should be."
The documents can be downloaded via the links in the Current Documents section on this page. They are pdf files and require Acrobat Reader version 5.0 or later, which can be obtained here. If you have difficulty opening the files, you could try to download them to your hard-disk first by right-clicking on the link and selecting Save Target As).
For further information or to comment on the study, please telephone (01463) 702 568.