I’m taking the the slightly risky strategy of using figures from Wikipedia in this post, so apologies in advance if I’ve been misled by the internet.

The latest suggestion from HMG is that maybe if we switched to biofuel to heat our houses then the proposed 2026 ban on new oil boilers might not be necessary. Phew, what a relief….. but lets look at some figures.

Apparently the yield of biofuel from oilseed rape (brobably the best bet for biofuels in the UK) is about 1000 litres per hectare. Now that corresponds nicely with our own heating oil usage during the winter of about 1000 litres (at 60p a litre earlier in the year). We also burn about 2 cubic metres of logs at about £150 a c.ubic mitre. So roughly £900 a year keeps us warm through the winter in our modest country pile.

So from this we can see that we switched to biofuels we’d need about a hectare of arable land dedicated solely to us. NB, a hectare is 10,000 square meters – that’s an area 100m x 100m.

Now there are about 1.7 million houses in the UK that rely on oil for heating. Thus if we make the simple assumption that we are about the average (and we’re probably lower than that), then we need 1.7 million hectares of land to stop people living off-grid from freezing during the winter.

That’s a lot of land.

To put this in context, the UK had about 4.4 million hectares of arable land planted with crops in 2022. So, to use biofuels we’d need to use 1.7/4.4 = 38.6% of this to heat all the off-grid houses.

So we could all convert to biofuels, but we’d all have to go on a diet! And of course, some arable land is already being converted to solar power anyway, so there’s even less available.

Regarding the price, looking at the Tesco vegetable oil prices (a randomly chosen example), I see it’s about £1.70 per litre. That’s about 3x the price I paid for conventional heating oil, so of course i’d be only too happy to switch….NOT!

The major political parties seem oblivious to this. A shame, since they’re supposed to be running things!

I despair – are there any adults in the house?