Murphy has just completed an eight-month odyssey around America chalking up 16,000 miles and passing through 30 states without burning a single drop of gasoline. Instead he made the trip in a variety of green machines running on everything from soya oil through solar power to electricity and cow dung.
But by far the most outrageous of his contraptions is the modified car that carried him and his faithful sidekick — a jack russell called Sparky — across the swampy state powered entirely by crawfish, jambalaya and the occasional Pop Tart.
And this wasn’t any super-light, high-tech eco-warrior’s car, for the food-powered machine was none other than a Hummer — the giant off-roader immortalised during the first Gulf war. A 20ft-long monster, it is usually driven by middle-aged behemoths such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who can afford the typical 6mpg fuel consumption.
Unexpectedly, Murphy got 12mpg from his borrowed Hummer. “It was down to the fuel, especially the beignets (sugary loaves),” he tells me when we meet near his temporary workshop in Santa Cruz, California. “I wanted to prove that any vehicle can work on renewable fuels, and often work better.”
The machine was made green by Russell Gehrke, a do-it-yourself wizard from Branson, Missouri, who had already converted his 1996 BMW Z3 to run on corn whiskey — the golden liquid so beloved of 1930s bootleggers. He created and fitted a giant gasifier to the 6.5 litre Hummer: a bucket-sized oven mounted on the back of the vehicle.
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“All you do is pull around the back of a restaurant and load it up with the scraps and leftovers. It takes seconds for the gasifier to vaporise the mush into hydrocarbon gas. That then feeds through a pipe so big [Murphy circles his massive paws around an imaginary 5in bore] running under the chassis and into the engine. There it mixes with oxygen and acts like fossil fuel, turning the Hummer into a beast with an appetite for Cajun food.”
Murphy, 38, started out as a landscape gardener in Sydney before moving into television and becoming a well-known face on lifestyle shows. On a whim he decided to drive an Indian motorised rickshaw (known as a tuc-tuc) 800 miles from the outback to Sydney harbour, and make a film about his journey. The film was picked up by an American television producer who persuaded Murphy to repeat the stunt on a grander, more ambitious scale in America.
His progress will form the basis of a television series to be broadcast in the US next spring. He hopes that it will serve as a timely reminder that going green really is a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
Alternative fuels have been around since Karl Benz patented the motor car in 1886, with everything from pure alcohol to sugar beet still used routinely to power agricultural vehicles from India to Iowa.
Here in Britain there is a small following of motorists who use the leftover oil from restaurants to power their cars, reporting no problems except for a lingering smell of fish and chips. However, this sort of activity is always a low-key, marginal affair, largely carried on away from mainstream attention.
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But in the US, where 280m people drive 210m traditional vehicles and two presidents by the name of Bush have gone to war at least partially over oil, there is a low hum of real debate, a sense that the search for something more home-grown, less unpatriotic, is evolving from hippie-dippiness into a burgeoning cottage industry. A million gallons of biofuel were sold as opposed to home-brewed in the US last year — twice as much as a decade ago.
And the movement has found many high-profile backers. Daryl Hannah, the actress who most recently played a one-eyed assassin in Kill Bill, has been driving a scraps-powered pick-up truck around her ranch in the Rocky mountains for years. The clinically shy actress is so passionate about her admittedly smelly machine that she goes on the road to promote it more often than she hits the highway to plug her movies.
Hannah is not alone in giving the green transport cause a touch of celebrity, and stars ranging from Leonardo DiCaprio to Cameron Diaz have raved so much about the Toyota Prius (a petrol-electric hybrid, rather than biofuel-powered car), that there is now a lengthy waiting list for them, and buyers are paying a $5,000 premium to queue-jump.
Even Arnold — the “Governator” — has “hybridised” one of his Hummers as he campaigns to build the first “hydrogen highway” between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, wants to see filling stations for hydrogen-fuelled cars located every 20 miles along the 101 freeway.
As Murphy joyfully ran amok across the US in 28 different vehicles he had no need of filling stations at all. Some of the vehicles he used were loaned to him by private individuals who had modified their own cars and motorbikes to run on environmentally sound energy, while others were the product of high-tech research and development projects run by universities and businesses. The aim of the trip was to prove that it can be done.
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Starting out from San Francisco in a Corbin Sparrow — a tiny single-seater resembling a Bubble car — that ran on electricity produced by geothermal power stations, he trekked north to the frozen Canadian border states. Several electric vehicles later, the self-styled ‘Eco-Trekker’ found himself in the agricultural heartland of America, where some farmers have survived only by turning their cowpats, chicken droppings and rotting waste vegetables into methane gas and selling it on to local electricity grids.
“Cow poo is big in the Midwest,” says the irrepressible Murphy. “Yes, methane can be unstable, but it got us from Green Bay to Chicago. What is amazing is the generosity and ingenuity of the Americans outside the cities. They would hear me on the radio and offer me their pride-and-joy machines for a couple of hundred miles. That is how we got around America: goodwill, cow pies, grass . . . whatever was in town.”
There was a lot of variety among the vehicles. Some were massive: even the 6ft 3in Murphy was dwarfed by a battery-powered Electra Cruiser motorbike that looked like a steroid-enhanced Harley but ran at 70mph in eerie silence. Some were tiny: the battery-powered Vego SX600 folding scooter with a top speed of 20mph looked more like the plaything of a child with an inventive dad than a serious mode of transport. And, of course, there was the food-guzzling Hummer.
It wasn’t just road vehicles that Murphy used. His trip included a spell in a solar-powered canoe, while he claims that the most exhilarating moment was flying over Iowa in a jet-turbine plane called the Moonie, running on moonshine and embossed with corn cobs. “Just me, the pilot and Sparky: I was high on corn whiskey.”
But he saved the most eye-catching vehicle for last. After eight months on the open road Murphy finally crossed the finish line back where he started in San Francisco, driving a stretched Hummer across the Golden Gate Bridge.
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The 32ft limo, normally rented out to Hollywood stars and rich teenagers trying to impress their prom dates, was a veritable feast of alternative energy sources. It featured corn whiskey and soya bean oil in the main tank, mixed with Sparky’s dog food, biscuits and bananas vaporised in a gasifier, and boosted by an ethanol feed from another tank.
In addition, as this was a grand finale, Murphy and his three travelling buddies fixed 10 solar-power panels to the roof, which provided electricity for a hydrogen convertor.
Despite the extra weight, he vastly improved the somewhat absurd “efficiency” of the monster truck from an appalling 3mpg to 10mpg.
“When we left we didn’t know if we could achieve it, but now it’s become a reality,” writes a clearly exhausted Murphy on his weekly web diary, before signing off: “Push the boundaries and you’ll find that virtually anything is possible.”