How the Energy Minister failed his MoT 

For non-UK readers: the MoT (Ministry of Transport) test is the annual road-worthiness check for vehicles at least three years old.

Let me start with an anecdote, writes Julian Flood in The Conservative Woman. It’s relevant so please bear with me.

A friend needed an MoT on his 4×4. We’re a working village and many of the big Range Rovers and Toyotas you see are working vehicles, not status symbols. This one has had a hard life but it does the job. Drive from home, into the garage, up on the ramp.

There was a problem. It registered only vanishingly small levels of NOX and particulates, so obviously the test kit had failed. It had to go back the next week after the machine was recalibrated.

Drive from home, into the garage, on to the ramp. No NOX, no CO, no HC, no particulates, or at least levels too low to measure.

After much discussion and head-scratching the car was put to the back of the queue and tested again at the end of the day. Start up, on to the ramp: normal and perfectly safe emissions.

The tester hadn’t been told that this was a conversion, a petrol engine which starts on petrol and then, when it is warm, runs on compressed natural gas. The first two tests had been carried out on the engine at working temperature when it was so non-polluting that it didn’t even register, the third when it was cold and running on petrol.

Petrol bad. Natural gas good.

This is how we could convert carbon-rich machines, cars, central heating, if we frack our own natural gas.

Continued here…which brings in the Energy Minister.