Vintage Old

Vintage Old

An Inconvenient Truth: Prince Charles is greener than Al Gore

Al Gore has become the international darling of environmental lobby groups after his highly successful movie. But when it comes to putting preaching into practice, Mr Gore has been dragging his carbon feet compared to His Royal Highness, Prince Charles, the next king of England.

Prince Charles is so dedicated to environmental issues that he uses reed bed sewage systems and wood chip boilers at his homes in Highgrove, England and Birkhall, Scotland, as well as insisting his cows are fed on grass rather than grain, to minimise flatulence, one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gas methane.

But most impressively of all, Prince Charles now runs his vintage Aston Martin DB6, an iconic sports car, on white wine. Sadly, not a cheeky little vintage from the Loire valley but some cheap surplus English wine from Wiltshire, close to his Highgrove home. And what else would you do with English wine? Drink it?

The DB6, the ultimate gas guzzler, which was a 21st birthday present to Charles from his mother, Queen Elizabeth 11, still manages only a pathetic ten miles to the gallon, or in vineyard statistics, 4.5 bottles of wine per mile. But the Prince's 38-year-old runaround produces an impressive 85 per cent less carbon dioxide since it started running on bio-ethanol fuel.

The Prince's chief aide Sir Michael Peat said: 'Charles only travels two or three hundred miles a year in the Aston but he wanted it to be environmentally friendly. It just happened that our bio-ethanol supplier makes the fuel from surplus English wine.' Surplus because the Wiltshire vineyard continually goes over its European Union quota and instead of pouring the excess wine down the drain, sell it cheaply to the Gloucestershire bio-fuels supplier Green Fuels, where it is distilled for HRH.

After being informed by Aston Martin that Prince Charles wanted to run his DB6 on bio-ethanol, they contacted Gloucester-based Green Fuels for help. The company bought in 8,000 litres of surplus white wine from a nearby vineyard - for a mere 1p a litre - and ran it through their distillery. .

By boiling off the wine's 11% alcohol, condensing it and removing any remaining water, Green Fuels ended up with hundreds of litres of 99.8% pure ethanol, which they topped up with alcohol extracted from fermented whey from local cheesemakers. After re-tuning the Aston's carburettors to allow more fuel into the engine it was ready to run on a mix of 85% ethanol and 15% petrol.

James Hygate of Green Fuels says: "Anything that contains alcohol can be distilled in the same way you produce vodka and whisky. The only waste is fruit juice and that is sent off to make bio-gas for electricity."

So technically, you could run your car on Tanqueray or Jim Beam, though it would turn out a lot more expensive. The Prince is fortunate to have wine-making neighbour willing to sell him the wine at the sort of price you will not even find at Wal-Mart. But while the green Prince waits to become king of England, he can enjoy himself as king of the road.

Roy Collins is a distinguished English journalist and author who writes on a number of topics. For something amazing Click Here!