I'd guess a truck could easily use more than the 2,500 litre limit though, so the owner should either have paid the duty themselves or bought it from a supplier that was paying the duty and gave them a receipt to say so.

Personal use is fine though, and as a supermarket is not selling oil as fuel it doesn't affect them.

I heard that HMRC was spending in the region of £100 to process each duty payment, but the cheques they were receiving were often only for £10 or so! Also, they'd found that the number of people registered as biofuel producers had gone up from less than 10 at the start of the decade to a couple of thousand, so I guess what was a Friday afternoon task once a month had suddenly become a full-time job!

Anyway, I'm happy, because my car has a conversion to burn neat veg oil as well as diesel :-) I don't normally burn food-grade oil, but if there's a fuel shortage I have the option.

Interesting point about veg oil sales in the UK.

Last year I was able to buy veg oil (for cooking) for about 38p/litre.

Once it became legal for individuals to walk into a supermarket and buy veg oil for their cars the supermarkets quickly found that people were coming in and buying a whole shelf’s worth of veg oil in one go. They were, in effect, selling fuel at 38p/litre.

As the next cheapest option is normal diesel at 105p/litre, the supermarkets quickly moved to price food grade veg oil on parity with diesel.

So now the supermarkets are charging 95p/litre and upwards for veg oil to ensure that there is no benefit for car owners to empty the shelves. (Remember veg oil has slighly less energy per unit volume than diesel)

A good example of how biofuels will be priced at the exact same price as their closest competitor regardless of how cheap they are to produce, due to their miniscule sales volumes.

The Free Market at work.

Andy