Episode 1 Bang Goes the Theory

Hello and welcome to Bang.

I'm 800 kilometres north of Britain in the Norwegian Sea,

which produces over 200 million tonnes of oil and gas every single year.

I'm here to find out what goes into sourcing

and making our fuel to try and understand why it costs so much.

It seems almost every week there's a hike in fuel prices,

with petrol and diesel now costing over £1.40 per litre.

-How much does it cost to fill this up?

-Probably about...80 quid.

-80 quid?!

You're going to see a lot of people go out of business if it goes up any more.

Did you know petrol has tripled in 20 years?

Tripled in price since I started driving.

It's shockingly expensive and it's not just road fuel.

Household energy bills, over £1,000 a year, on average.

So, on tonight's show, Jem looks at some alternative fuel sources,

from biogas...

If you've ever wondered where those used tea bags and out of date potatoes end up,

it's probably at a place like this.

..to fracking - a controversial way of extracting natural gas from deep beneath the earth.

And Dallas takes Jem on in a challenge to make home-made fuel.

-I reckon it would make really good bike cider.

-Do you think?

I need you guys to help me turn this into rocket fuel.

But first, I've gone right to the source of the fuel price issue, oil.

Deep beneath these seas lie deposits of oil and gas.

They're formed from the remains of ancient fossilised organisms,

but extracting them is a huge and very expensive challenge.

We're about 150 kilometres off the coast of Norway and this is Draugan,

an oilrig that's sitting almost two kilometres above a reservoir

full of highly pressurised oil and gas.

This is engineering to the extreme

and running one of these things doesn't come cheap.

Draugan is unique, built on a single concrete mono-column,

with its foundations far below on the sea floor.

It's not just me, is it? This whole platform is swaying, is it?

It's designed to move. It's quite a long column - over 300 metres.

-Otherwise it would actually crack.

-OK, that's good to know.

Good to know.

Oyvind has managed the rig for almost ten years.

It sits over seven separate wells, where both gas

and oil rise up to the platform under hydrostatic pressure.

-This is the oil coming up through there.

-That's really hot.

That's oil coming up from under the sea bed.

How far below the sea bed is it?

From where you are now it's 2,000 metres.

So it's a reservoir going in this direction, north and south,

and the wells are then drilled horizontally into the reservoir.

And as you begin to empty out this reservoir,

the pressure isn't as high, so is it more difficult to get the oil out?

We inject sea water from the platform at each end

of the reservoir, since the platform is in the middle.

The seawater will replace the oil we take out.

So we maintain the pressure in that way.

After all the effort of getting it to the surface,

the oil is pumped back down to the seabed for storage.

We have seven storage tanks at the seabed

and there we can store around a million barrels of oil.

That's a lot at any one time.

Even so, tankers visit every week to empty the storage tanks of crude oil.

At its peak, Draugan was one of the highest producing platforms in the area.

But the oil here won't last forever,

so the search is already on for new reserves.

We now have to go further out in the ocean to deeper water.

As you get deeper and deeper the pressure will increase and

the temperature will increase and that makes it much more difficult.

Extraction is the most expensive stage of fuel production,

and with new reserves even harder to access,

the cost of fuel will only continue to rise.

A few hours ago, this oil was lying thousands of metres beneath my feet.

And it is a finite resource.

We're using it up far more quickly than it's made.

But we continue to invest huge amounts of money in its extraction,

which just goes to show how utterly reliant we still are on the stuff.

But getting it out of the ground is only the beginning of the story.

Crude oil is a complex soup of chemicals.

To make any useful fuel, you have to separate them out.

I've come to find out about this next stage of the process.

Here in Rotterdam, oil from all over the world is refined.

This is Pernis, a giant in the oil industry

and Europe's biggest refinery.

Now, many things affect the cost of fuel.

In the UK, about 60% of the price of petrol and diesel is tax.

But with production costs, processing is second to

extraction, easy to see when you look at the scale of this place.

There are enough pipes down there to go around the world four times.

Pernis can refine 750 litres of crude oil every second.

But even that only meets a fraction of Europe's fuel demand.

The new technology needed to find new deposits will cost even more,

and, of course, cost isn't the only issue that concerns people.

As well as the price of fossil fuels going up,

you've got the controversial issue of how they take their toll

on the environment, all of which is forcing us to find alternatives.

Dallas is looking for one that wouldn't cost a thing.

OK, wind power, solar energy, all very well if you've got

an electric car, but I want to know if there's anything else I can

put into my trusty petrol-powered moped, preferably something free.

-Is there a viable way to make our own fuel?

-I think yes.

There's got to be a way of undercutting the big players.

Do you know how these things work?

It's the internal combustion engine, they've been around for a while.

If we can make a repeated explosion in the cylinder,

with something that's not petrol, we're away.

-What are you thinking?

-Come with me, I'm going to show you.

Jem's fond of a good explosion, and that's exactly what you need to get an engine working.

I've built a little petrol engine here.

It might not look like a car or a motorbike,

but it works almost exactly the same way.

To show off the demo we needed a crowd -

cue a rainy Monday morning on Broadstairs Beach.

Here's the cylinders that you get inside the engine, here's the

piston that runs up and down inside the cylinder, this is the connecting

rod that connects it to the crank, that ultimately turns the wheel.

So, what does Jem think we can burn in an engine?

First up, the obvious - petrol.

Dallas is going to operate te spark plug.

Here we go, I'm your spark plug. Stand back, three, two, one.

OK, not surprisingly, petrol works a treat.

An almighty bang forcing the piston up. But what else could work?

-Here I've got methane gas. Dallas.

-Three, two, one.

-There's an engine-running fuel that's not petrol.

-Anything else?

-What is this?

-That's my icing sugar.

-You've got a bag of icing sugar?

If you're not convinced that icing sugar would burn, watch this.

Give it something big.

-Not bad.

-'All very impressive, but sugar? Inside an engine?'

Oh! Ooh! Oh!

Oh!

Ultimately, the problem is that your engine will eventually clog up.

So sugar's too messy. What else?

Now, this worries me, Jem.

It says, "Product of Poland, 95%". 'Alcohol.

-'But would this work in Jem's engine?'

-Right, Dallas, give that a go.

Ready? Stand back. Three, two, one.

Very, very effective as an engine fuel.

Let's here it for Polish vodka!

So there you go - it's clean, it burns,

alcohol - the fuel for my bike.

All I need now is a good home brew recipe.

What say we get a bit of a challenge on?

Get yourself one of those, make your own fuel from scratch,

whichever way you see fit, and I'll see you back here in a week.

Dallas, if you're suggesting that we spend a week larking

around making our own fuel and then racing a motorbike, of course.

-I will see you in one week's time.

-One week!

-Laters.

-Can you give me a push?

-Yeah.

OK, here's my plan.

I've got a bike too - in fetching red -

but I reckon Dallas will struggle to brew alcohol strong enough.

I'm going for one of the other fuels we tried - methane.

Because, although North Sea gas is very expensive,

it's not the only sort of methane.

Methane is a highly flammable gas that occurs

naturally in a whole variety of locations -

including right in there.

See, animals like this hold certain bacteria in their stomachs

that help them digest their dinner,

but in the process produce a whole load of methane.

My plan is to get hold of some pretty similar bacteria, feed the bacteria

a stack of high calorie food

and hopefully harvest the methane that comes off.

I should then be able to use that gas to power a motorbike.

This kind of gas is called biogas.

It's nothing new,

in fact we have around 70 commercial biogas plants in the UK.

Many areas of the country now have specific food waste collections.

And if you've ever wondered where those used teabags,

old chicken carcasses and out of date potatoes end up,

it's probably at a place like this.

Here in Oxford, the gas is burnt in engines to produce

enough electricity to power over 4,000 homes.

Elsewhere, it's piped straight back into the gas mains.

Fuel from waste - it looks like a win-win situation.

Now to make some of my own.

What I need now is the gassiest food I can lay my hands on.

So I'm going to see how sprouts work out.

They have a reputation, as indeed do baked beans.

Another option, maybe feed the bacteria a very high protein

diet, so I've got some fish here.

My other suspicion is that calories might count. Therefore, biscuits.

And plenty of them. And for a digester, I've gone for a digestive.

These are mechanical stomachs.

They contain anaerobic bacteria,

which are heated to body temperature.

As they digest my food, the gas produced will be measured

and captured in bags.

You're well fed and you're well sealed. Now make flammable gas.

Overnight, the bacteria sprang into action.

By morning, I had a clear winner. Finally, I've got gas.

The one that I fed on digestive biscuits seems to be doing

a tremendous job.

If I look on the graph here,

it looks like overnight I've got about 12.5 litres of biogas.

Now I reckon if I feed every single one of these on digestives,

by Tuesday morning I should have produced just enough gas

to race Dallas on a motorbike powered by biscuits.

A few days later, I had a stack of biscuit biogas.

But it wasn't quite ready to run an engine.

The biogas that the bacteria have kindly made for us

is not a pure gas.

It's made up of methane and carbon dioxide

and a little bit of stinky stuff called hydrogen sulphide.

Now, methane burns tremendously well,

but carbon dioxide is what you fill fire extinguishers with.

It doesn't aid combustion in any way, it puts the whole process out.

I want to know what effect this has on the flammability of my gas.

Let's see what we get here.

Well, quite underwhelming, really.

The plan now is to try and remove all that flame-suppressing

carbon dioxide from the biogas.

I'm going to do it with drain cleaner.

If I pump my biogas through that liquid, bubble it through,

then it should take out the carbon dioxide from the gas bubbles,

leaving me, essentially, with pure methane.

That definitely seems like a more potent mixture,

so we must have removed a good portion of the carbon dioxide

that was suppressing the flames. Good.

My clean-up system works.

But filtering a few hundred litres of biogas with a bike pump

was going to take a little while longer.

The filling stations of the future will hopefully have this sorted in a slightly quicker way.

It was late, but I was done, and left with one last problem.

That could get me, I don't know, five miles on my motorbike, maybe. Maybe just two or three.

But as you can see, as I start building up a decent fuel tank,

it all gets a little ungainly. What I'm going to have to do is

find something that I can compress all this gas into.

Squeeze it down into some sort of tough, durable, high-pressure container.

Like a pop bottle. Or maybe even a whole rack of them.

Meanwhile, I've been on the search for free alcohol.

And I think I've found the answer, cider.

You can make booze out of pretty much anything,

as long as you know roughly what you're doing

and you've got plenty of sugar, which is why apples are perfect

because you don't need to add any extra sugar because they're sweet enough.

And have a look at this.

I've even dug out the old Campbell apple cider recipe.

I've come to an organic farm in Devon with these healthy, happy people

are packing fruit and veg boxes with local produce.

But not every fruit passes the fitness test.

-Rachel, I need apples. I need a lot of apples.

-OK.

-Can we work out some kind of deal?

-Yeah, we can.

You've got to earn it first of all.

-You've got to help me sort through these.

-What am I looking for?

Anything with dinks, bruises or mould on them, we can't send out.

That the deal, I'll help you sort these apples

if I can take ones you don't want.

Yep. When I say help, I mean you do it.

I might be here a while!

One for me.

Right, I've got the raw materials. Time to get these into liquid form.

-I need to make a brew out of this lot.

-Yeah.

We've got to put that through the shredder first,

which reduces them to a pulp.

Once we had our pulp, we could get the fun bit.

John uses a traditional pressing method.

The pulp is spread over a mesh

and layers are built up inside a wooden vice.

Apply a little pressure and out comes the sugary juice.

-Couldn't be simpler really, could it?

-No.

Cider's been made like this for centuries.

Thank you very much indeed. I'm going to take my barrel of apple juice...

-Right, lovely.

-..and start my brew up.

-Well, good luck.

OK, right, we've got our lovely, sweet apple juice here.

The next thing we need to do is add the magic ingredient, the yeast.

It's a fungus and that uses the sugar in here for respiration.

It's going to give us a couple of by-products.

It'll give off CO2 and more importantly for us,

at least, it's going to give us alcohol.

Yeast is happiest when it's warm, around body temperature.

So with my barrel of juice, I set off in search of a free heat source.

I remember when I was a kid, my mum used to go absolutely spare

because my stepdad made dandelion wine, of all things,

and he used to use the airing cupboard upstairs

to get his brew going because it was nice and warm.

I'm actually standing on a big pile of poo

and as all this organic material, the poo and straw breaks down,

it generates a lot of heat and just to show you how much heat...

OK, that's 40 degrees. This is going to be absolutely perfect for my brew.

The yeast are going to love it there.

Now, cider making requires a little bit of patience

so I left the yeast to get on with their work.

OK. Still nice and warm which is a good sign but A,

hasn't had long enough to fully ferment and B, even if it did

fully ferment in here, it's only going to be about 4% alcohol,

something like that, which is clearly not enough to run my moped.

For that, we need to get rid of all that excess water

and get that alcohol level to something like 95%, thereabouts.

That's the kind of thing we want.

And in order to do that, I need to find someone with a licence to still.

I'm heading to Somerset, home of cider making

and one of the only artisan cider distilleries in the country.

At this farm, they produce 12-year-old cider brandy.

But what would they make of my brew?

Is this the worst cider you've ever tasted?

Close, close.

OK, so no awards but they've agreed to help me distil it

into fuel-strength alcohol.

I reckon it would make really good bike cider.

When my cider is superheated, the alcohol should evaporate

and condense in these copper towers, leaving me with a fuel.

But would it be strong enough to beat Jem?

-How strong is it?

-It's just over 55%...

-OK.

..which isn't what you're looking for.

Unfortunately because of the weakness of the cider in the first place

and the small volumes, we can't get it any higher for you.

I need to beat Jem in this motorcycle race.

We do have some 98% apple spirit.

That will send the bike up the beach as quickly as you could

possibly measure it.

-Good man. Thank you very much indeed.

-Thank you.

-Thank you very much, Tim.

-You're very welcome.

-Wish me luck.

-Good luck.

-Game on.

Dallas and I aren't the only ones searching for alternative fuels.

Because the future for oil is so uncertain,

people are starting to look at more widespread gas reserves.

But sometimes, the only way to get at them

is by a process called fracking.

France said no, they're called a halt to it in South Africa

and in parts of United States, folk are up in arms about it.

But what actually is fracking?

Fracking is a way of mining the hard to reach gas reserves trapped

deep underground in the most common type of sedimentary rock, shale.

This all once started out as mud but over millions of years

of heat and pressure, it's been forged into rock

and this type of shale has ended up with these distinct individual

layers. They're almost stacked up like the pages of a book.

As the rock formed, organic matter trapped between these layers

turned into natural methane gas and there's potentially

enough of it in the UK to meet gas demands for decades.

The problem is, it's deep underground

and the only way to get to it is to drill.

But you've got to drill down a distance that's about twice

the height of Ben Nevis and even then, the problem isn't solved

because the gas is held within pockets within those compressed layers of rock.

How do you get it out?

To release it from where it's embedded deep underground,

you need a tool that's flexible, powerful...

and can find its own way into every weakness.

To get that, you just have to turn on the tap.

High-pressure water can be forced down the pipe

right into the heart of the rock, where it'll find any weaknesses

and burrow into the cracks, prising apart the shale

and hopefully releasing the gas.

A nice piece of fracking.

When they do it for real, it's deep underground

and it's not just one fracture, it's many, many fractures,

spreading a long way through the bed of shale.

And it's not just water that's sent down, they send down sand as well.

Because the little grains of sand then serve to prop

all those cracks open so all the pockets of gas are now joined up

and can seep back towards the pipe where they can be easily extracted.

But disturbing the bedrock of the Earth like this can have unexpected side-effects.

Last year in Lancashire, earthquakes of magnitudes up to 2.3

were triggered in Britain's first fracking tests. But according to

the British Geological Survey, they shouldn't have caused any damage.

There are lots of faults around below us. They're everywhere.

Very small faults and probably some water got into one of the faults

and was able to lubricate the two planes that meet

in the faults, so that the fault moved a little bit.

Size wise, how would those earthquakes rank with what you might expect in the UK anyway?

In a typical month, we might have say 10 earthquakes

of about that size, purely natural and larger ones as well.

Is there any chance that with fracking, we'll get more significant quakes?

There are probably limits to the amount of energy these earthquakes

can produce in the shale that is being fracked.

In effect, you can't get a very large earthquake.

But on top of the risk of quakes, some people worry that chemicals

added to the fracking water or even methane itself

could leak into groundwater and affect drinking supplies.

The distance between where the fracking is going on

and where the water is being taken out is so large and the rock

is so dense and impermeable, it would be really hard for the methane

to get anywhere beyond a few metres.

So the hope is that the risks can be managed, meaning fracking

could be carried out safely in the UK.

But in this country, it's still experimental and we don't know how it'll affect the price of gas.

We really don't know exactly how much gas there might be embedded

in rocks beneath our land, but we know it could be a substantial amount

and we also know it's possible to extract it but it's still

a fossil fuel and when you burn it, it gives off carbon dioxide.

And for all the huge financial investment it takes to set up

a fracking industry, we're still talking about a finite resource.

The gas will run out one day.

The boys are almost ready for their fuel challenge.

But first, Dr Yan has got one for you to think about.

I'm taking one of the most efficient forms of petrol-power transport

and one of the most efficient forms of human-powered transport.

The question is, which can go further on the same amount of fuel?

Dr Yan's answer is on our website as always and while you're there,

follow the links to the Open University

to get a free Bang Goes The Theory poster or you can call:

And don't forget to check out our fabulous Bang roadshows.

We're all over the country again this year, starting at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham

this weekend and then we're off to Edinburgh. Details are all on:

It's time to put Dallas and Jem's home-made fuels to the test.

One slippery beach, two highly competitive presenters

and someone to keep things under control.

Are you feeling confident, lads?

-Kind of.

-Jem, what the heck is going on here?

Well, that used to be a bunch of pop bottles.

It's now a high-pressure fuel tank.

Driven carefully, each of these can get me nearly a mile.

-Dallas, you've gone for a much more streamlined affair. It's very you.

-It's very elegant.

-And it basically apple flavoured schnapps.

-I did have a little bit of help, I confess.

-Did you?

-From my friends at the distillery.

-We'll let you off.

-I wouldn't drink it, if I were you.

-It might do you some damage.

-OK, it's a simple little race.

-To the end, round the flag, come back again.

-What do we win?

Well, there's no prize but whoever loses buys everyone else ice cream.

-Let's do this.

-Let's go!

-Let's go!

APPLAUSE

Gentleman, are you ready?

Three, two, one,

go!

Oh, no!

Oh, we've had stallage! We've had stallage!

Jem Stansfield is coursing into the lead.

Dallas is roaring his engine and off he goes

on his apple alcohol in the wet sand.

Jem is now pushing with his legs, ladies and gentlemen.

It's going to be a very interesting race.

Come on, Campbell, you can do it.

Jem seems to be doing very well.

But Dallas is closing in as they both approach the yellow flag,

the halfway mark.

OK, this is where it gets interesting.

Jem is wobbling on his bike. I think he's just crashed into the rocks.

Good grief!

Dallas has gone around the flag and now needs to keep his cool

because they are now both literally neck and neck.

Now, both boys are giving it welly.

They've both come round that flag after getting back on their bikes.

They're neck and neck, ladies and gentlemen.

Jem is not going to be happy because Dallas has just passed him.

It could be the Campbell on his apple fuel. This is exciting.

Here he comes. Here he comes round the bend.

If he keeps his cool, he's got the race. Don't panic, Campbell.

Keep it together!

And we have a winner!

That was awesome.

-Hurry up, Jem.

-What happened to your gloves?

-You're sitting on my gloves.

-Dallas.

-Good man, thank you very much.

-I feel a bit bad about your tumble there on the race.

-It's all right.

What went wrong, Jem Stansfield? Come on, dish.

Nothing much apart from the massively unsuccessful power slide at the far end.

You tried to show off again. Little bit, just a little bit.

-In all seriousness, are both these fuels commercially viable on a large scale?

-Totally.

In this country at the moment, we're converting a proportion

of our waste food into biogas and it's the calories, the energy in that waste food,

a lot of that gets turned into the energy in the methane.

In places like Sweden, they run a good amount of the public transport on biogas. It works.

The controversial thing about bioethanol is that if you're

growing crops for fuel, you're not growing crops to feed people.

But there's another generation of new bioethanol where they're going to be growing crops that can do both.

-So we'll see.

-Good stuff.

-I'm leaking here.

And on that note, that's it from us for this week.

From a very rainy Broadstairs beach, we'll see you next week. Good night.

-Good night.

-Good night.

-Bye!

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