The Centre for Sustainable Practice received a grant from EECA to form a consortium of biodiesel users in the region.

The long term aim is to roll out the commercial use of biodiesel across Otago and Southland. The immediate aim is to facilitate the introduction of biodiesel in the Queenstown Lakes area by bringing together pertinent potential users in the area and, through their joint involvement, provide a sizeable hub of biodiesel users from which to broker a commercial biodiesel fuel supply contract.

The reason for first choosing the Queenstown area for this initiative is because of the strong support offered by the local businesses, and high profile nature of the target users – mainly operators working with tourists from overseas. In support, Mayor Clive Geddes has already communicated directly with Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee over this initiative and was given an encouraging response.

Supported by the recent biodiesel grant scheme, the use of B20 does now appear to be cost effective even for locations such as Queenstown (which are some distance from current biodiesel manufacturing plant) if sufficient quantities of fuel are involved.

A meeting of potential biodiesel users held in Queenstown on 15 October 2009 found there to be tremendous support for the use of biodiesel fuels. Together, interested parties were responsible for around an annual demand of 1.5 million litres of diesel from Queenstown refuelling stations alone. Most potential users, however, first wanted to pilot the use of biodiesel before any full switch of their fleets to biodiesel fuels.  A request for proposals for the supply of fuel to provide for this pilot is in process.