Food for thought

Duncan Soukup, the banker and entrepreneur who has raised £3.1 million on AIM for seismic offshore oil exploration equipment specialist Thalassa, is one energy player speaking out with passion against the biofuel craze. Confident his company’s Portable Modular Source System is ‘environmentally clean’, he declares the dash for biofuels, with EU and government target quotas, as a ‘scandal and a time bomb’.

Citing abundant expert sources, Soukup, a veteran of Wall Street house Bear Stearns (before its recent difficulties), argues the excessive use of fertilisers and nitrates to maximise the production of fuel from crops is causing them to run off into channels, streams, rivers and the sea, draining the water of oxygen. He contends that the consequent ‘hypoxia’, loss of oxygen, is already poisoning huge expanses of water, but, because the crops are being grown for fuel not human consumption, he maintains that legal limits on the use of fertilisers do not apply.

‘The Gulf of Mexico is becoming a dead zone and so is the sea of Oregon and the seas in the Far East,’ insists Soukup, who nurtured pre-float Thalassa (meaning sea in classical Greek) with loans that he has now converted into shares and advant-ageous options.

It is easy for sceptics to say he opposes biofuel given his role in oil exploration, but he does have a weight of learned opinion on his side and has by no means uttered his last word on the subject.