A QUICK look through Tony Marmont's kitchen window tells you a lot about the man's abiding core interests. Centre front, at the bottom of a hill, is the large lake he built on his 50 acres of rolling green farmland near Loughborough.

To the right you can see two wind turbines turning gracefully in a late November breeze.

On the ground to the left, almost out of sight, is an array of solar PV and solar water-heating panels tilted up towards the sky.

In the foreground, immediately outside the window, hang several bird feeders which attract constant attention from blue tits and even an occasional woodpecker.

Environmental concern and renewable energy – these are the current intertwined interests of a millionaire businessman who, at 81, not only has no intention of slowing down but is about to thrown himself into a new venture that might just save the world from itself.

Sometime towards the end of the year, Marmont and four business partners will switch on a small pilot plant to manufacture a liquid hydrocarbon fuel that will do the same job as oil-based fuels.

If all goes well they intend to build a larger plant, then an even bigger one, with the eventual aim of producing 1,000 tonnes of fuel a day.

The production process, called air fuel synthesis, combines carbon dioxide and hydrogen to make hydrocarbon fuel. Since the raw material supplying these molecules is air, the supply of the fuel is, in theory, infinite.

With the power to fuel the process coming from renewable energy, the entire shebang is also carbon neutral, thus giving a green alternative to fossil fuel that could be used to make petrol, diesel, aviation fuel, fertiliser, plastics or indeed just about anything that is currently based on oil.

This venture needs investment to take it to a commercial stage and so next summer Marmont and his colleagues intend to take their company, Air Fuel Synthesis, public and issue shares to raise £21m.

Marmont doesn't foresee that there will be any problem in raising this money, or indeed the much larger amount of capital that will be required for the second stage of investment in a few years time.

The fact is, he says, that the world desperately needs an effective and readily available alternative to fossil fuel – not just to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions which are warming the globe, but to avert impending energy wars as nations and continents compete for dwindlin, and increasingly expensive, oil resources.

"I want to prevent gang warfare and even if I'm wrong, and I hope I bloody well am, we will still have produced a clean fuel and we can march the world ahead on a clean fuel rather than a dirty one," he says.

Marmont doesn't flag himself up as any kind of green energy messiah and he certainly doesn't look or sound like one.

His background is the orthodox business world, having run the successful Carters soft drinks manufacturing operation in Kegworth for several decades until he sold it for £45m in 1993.

He has since used his money to support a wide range of renewable energy enterprises, including building wind farms and funding renewable research energy institutions at De Montfort and Loughborough universities.

He is also a special professor in renewable energy at the University of Nottingham.

If there's a blip in his green credentials, it must be his personal helicopter, which he admits to using like a car.

While regular use of a personal helicopter may not be a model of fuel efficiency, he can perhaps be forgiven this luxury given the many other ways he has gone about applying his renewable energy beliefs to his domestic life.

His turbines, solar panels and a heat pump in his lake all supply the energy he needs for his home, which is also extremely well insulated thanks to his addition of an extra-thick wall of straw bales.

Marmont farmed his estate until he was 75 and he now winces slightly at the memory that he had to buy-in the straw because he'd given up farming by the time he decided to add the insulation.

When Marmont tells this story you get the feeling that inside some greens there lurks a view that the unnecessary spending of money is an inefficient use of resources.

Marmont, though, says he has spent more money than he's saved and that he first became convinced that energy was the abiding problem of the age back in the 1970s, when OPEC put a stranglehold on western oil supplies.

He is also still a businessman and he often cites experiences from his years with the soft drinks operation, which he joined at age 16 after leaving Nottingham High School, to back up his business case for the new fuel enterprise.

The big backdrop to the development of this process is his solid belief that geopolitical forces will soon force fossil fuel users – all of us, in other words – to take energy issues very seriously indeed, especially now that China's oil consumption is starting to rise towards western levels.

This massive new demand, says Marmont calmly, will compel competing nations to seize what oil they can for themselves while demand pushes the price up to $500 and then $1,000 per barrel. It's the way the market works, except that the customers wanting to buy this particular resource will be nations forced into armed conflict to secure their supplies.

"Now you can think that is totally extreme, but when you get to a situation where the world's oil supply is oversold by 100%, which is what I've postulated, how do you think it will affect the price?" he says. "I've been in the commodities market all my life and I used to buy sugar, CO2, citric acid, lemon juice and orange juice for soft drinks. If the market place had a half a percent surplus I could always get a good deal – they'd be competitive and looking to get a good price from me.

"If the market became half a percent short, nobody would answer the phone, they're all sold out, it's all contracted forward, you can't have any. And the price goes up double.

"So as soon as stuff becomes short… so oil will go up and the figures I've given you are not stupid."

Marmont is hardly the first person in the green spectrum to predict that resource shortages will have apocalyptic impacts.

Nor is he the only innovator to come up an energy scheme that could help cure some of the world's ills. Hydrogen has been used as a fuel for decades and synthetic oil was manufactured before and during the Second World War, especially by Nazi Germany, which used coal to make oil for use in its tanks and aircraft.

What's different is that the earlier synthetic oils were still based on fossil fuels whereas Marmont's hydrocarbon fuel is created entirely from renewable sources. And, what's more, as Marmont sees it, the world badly needs a mass produced green alternative to fossil fuels right now.

With a first successful career already under his belt, Marmont has worked hard at the business case for his new fuel and has already built the pilot plant to make small quantities.

The machine they've nicknamed the Dribbler – producing five litres a day – has cost Marmont and his business partners £1m of their own money and is currently housed in a 30ft container in County Durham. "It's a miniature of the real plant with everything on it – air capture, electrolysis etc," he explains. "It is finished and we're going to run it probably at the end of this month, probably producing five litres a day – big guns!

"But once we know it will produce five litres a day the jump to a ten-tonne plant is a bit easier, then we could jump to 100 or a 1,000 tonnes.

"You build a pilot plant and find out the errors and gains, then you build a bigger plant before you put your foot in it. We're aiming to produce 1,000 tonnes a day, which is a standard unit.

"We've spent a million producing the Dribbler plant. It will cost us another £18m to produce the 100-tonne plant, so have a guess at how much it will cost to produce the 1,000-tonne plant. It gets cheaper as you get bigger…"

Umm…

"Six billion."

That's a lot of money and the way Marmont wants to raise the capital is by selling shares in his company Air Fuel Synthesis and licensing use of the technology to other users in return for a royalty income.

Users in poor countries will pay a small royalty fee of, say, half a per cent, while users in wealthy countries will be asked to pay a fee of five per cent.

This income will help fund further research while having a royalty fee license scheme calibrated in favour of the poor should help poor countries become more energy independent and even out global wealth inequalities.

Another relevant aspect of Marmont's thinking is that he doesn't want the air fuel synthesis technology to be patented. This is because he would rather see the technology widely adopted and modified by others, so widening its impact and benefits.

However, he has discovered that he will have to accept a degree of patenting. "We've been trying to raise money and the problem is that when we explain to the investor that we don't want to patent our product then he walks away," he says. "So we're in a cleft stick. The investor wants to see an IPR. We don't want one so we're working on 'could we make an IPR out of the new idea only'? And the answer is yes.

"So the whole process of making the fuel could be open and what could be in the patent would be little things like the type of catalyst we use, the process and pressures, so the investor gets something he can get his hands on but the rest of the world will see it is possible and can come to us, saying 'we'd like to manufacture this fuel in Zambia.' We'll say yes for a half a per cent royalty. The USA might come to us and we'll say five per cent royalty."

Marmont's desire to make the synthesis process universally accessible stems in part from his fear that it might otherwise be bought up by the petrochemical industry, which would proceed to sit on the patent and prevent any deployment or development.

He has sound reasons for this fear, having worked for Shell for over a decade after he agreed to sell the plant he built in Scunthorpe to manufacture the PET plastic he used for Carters' soft drink plastic bottles.

The story is an example of Marmont's entertaining digressions and it confirms what every self-respecting green has always suspected – that the big oil companies have no interest in developing renewable energy.

Marmont recalls that he was still in the office one night at 7.30pm when the night watchman called him and told him that the chairman of Shell was at the door.

"The gate watchman said, 'Oi! Tony, there's a bloke here who says he's chairman of Shell. I think he's pulling my leg.' So I said, 'what's he like?' He said, 'he's short, he speaks with a Scottish accent and he shakes with his left hand.' I said, 'that's him, let him in.' Anyway, he wanted to buy what we were doing [the PET plant]. I said it wasn't for sale. His financial team, who were a lot cleverer than me, said 'we'll give you x percent for your share holding.' It went on like that for so long that eventually I got fed up with it and said 'I'll sell the PET business.' So I worked for Shell for 12 years and I had a nice time.

"However, many times in the board meetings I would question what we were doing in terms of environmental issues and they would say 'Tony, I wish you'd shut up about your environmental ideas... we're going to stay with what we've got, maximise the demand and profit from oil and as the demand gets greater and the supply gets shorter the price will get higher and it will cost us no more to make the oil than it did when we started.

"We will make a huge profit and with that huge profit we will go out into the marketplace and buy up all the successful companies in the renewable field.' I said 'well that's a very poor attitude.'"

Large-scale manufacturing of Marmont's fuel will probably take place in north-east England or Scotland. At present Scotland is the favoured location and a meeting is being held with the Scottish Development Office which has held out the promise of business incentives – unlike the Government in Westminster which, says Marmont, has been blowing hot and cold over green energy.

"It will either be north-east England, in the Newcastle or Durham area, with cables out to wind farms, or in Aberdeen or somewhere like that with cables out to wind farms.

"What we want access to is plenty of power because we need 1.1MW to produce a tonne of fuel. But converting 1.1MW into a liquid fuel you lose some energy.

"A power station using coal or oil has a very poor conversion rate because [it loses] so much heat, but we will capture that and use it. That tells you where we are going."

If all goes well after next summer's public share offering to raise £21m, a second investment drive in three years' time will be held to raise £6bn to build a larger plant producing 1,000 tonnes a day.

The fuel will be unbranded but it's a sign of Marmont's faith in the product and its requirement in the current era that he does not foresee any problems in raising this amount of money.

At current rates the new fuel will sell for 90p a litre although that could all change if the Government changes the rules on renewable energy production. In any case, Marmont doesn't see himself as leading the company.

At 81, he thinks the business should be led by a younger man while he takes a back seat, but it seems a shame that Tony Marmont isn't 30 or even 20 years younger.

After all he's done for renewable energy and the green cause, you feel that he should now be leading the business which could help get the world off fossil fuel dependence.

Then again, he is old enough to be able to tell some interesting stories about an earlier era when alternative fuels, such as hydrogen, were not considered odd at all.

For example, during the Second World War, Barton's ran buses with hydrogen fuel bags on top of them and the young Tony Marmont was a passenger in one such bus when it got shot up by a fighter plane in Nottingham.

"I was coming back from Nottingham on the bus and we came past the Trip to Jerusalem in Castle Boulevard and I saw a fighter coming down the street at roof level," Marmont recalls. "Then I saw his wing tips sparkling. He was shooting. The next thing was that the bus was full of bullet holes. Nobody got hit but the hydrogen bag on the top had about five holes in it and was leaking gas. We took it back to the depot and used sticky tape to fix it up. But nobody got killed."