Wiseman bids to run tankers on cooking oil

Published on Sunday 23 September 2007 00:04

WISEMAN Dairies is looking to cut its carbon emissions by running its distinctive fleet of black and white trucks on waste cooking oil.

The company is investing 500,000 in a trial to find out whether the idea is feasible. It will also assess the potential for using liquid natural gas (LNG) following encouraging results from an earlier test run.

The East Kilbride firm's 1,500 vehicles cover 50 million miles a year moving milk to and from its network of dairies and distribution centres throughout the UK.

The company said results from a small-scale trial using LNG on two Wiseman vehicles had been positive and indicated that articulated vehicles running on a combination of LNG and diesel would reduce annual carbon emissions by around 11,500kgs per vehicle. That would be equal to five small cars travelling 10,000 miles a year.

Robert Wiseman, chief executive, said: "We want to scale up our trialling of these two alternative fuel systems to determine how they might bring benefits in the longer term, both to the environment and to the cost of running our fleet of vehicles."

Initial tests have suggested the LNG system might be suitable for transporting milk from the company's dairies to its distribution depots using articulated lorries, he said, whereas bio-diesel might have a better use in the tanker fleet making collections on farms and transporting milk to the dairies.

"We will monitor the progress of both these alternative fuel projects and aim to roll out suitable systems across our entire fleet in due course if they prove beneficial," he said.

Wiseman is likely to convert up to 20 vehicles to use LNG and 35 to run with a diesel/ cooking oil mixture.

The dual-fuel vehicles require conversion to add the LNG tank and they run on diesel until the engine is warm, automatically switching to run on gas which reduces engine noise and increases miles per gallon by over a third.

The bio-diesel trials involve using a product comprising 80% diesel and 20% from industrial by-products including used cooking oil and tallow, a waste product from abattoirs.

Wiseman is to update shareholders in a trading statement this week, its first announcement since last week's provisional findings of the Office of Fair Trading into price fixing.

The OFT claimed that shoppers were overcharged by 270m because supermarkets and dairies fixed the price of milk, butter and cheese.

The companies shared "highly commercially sensitive information" which led to reduced competition and higher prices in 2002 and 2003, the OFT said.

Wiseman, and the French-owned Scottish cheese supplier, Lactalis McLelland, were named along with Asda, Morrisons, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Safeway - now owned by Morrisons - and the dairy processors Arla, Dairy Crest and The Cheese Company.

Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons all denied the claims, while Wiseman said it "looked forward to defending [its] position". Its shares fell after the announcement.

All could face heavy fines if found to be in breach of the 1998 Competition Act. All the accused supermarkets and dairy processors can now set out their cases before the OFT reaches a final decision on whether they acted illegally.