Dossier No. 05

An invention against evaporation

Petrol evaporates from parked vehicles — quietly, constantly, expensively. SPPE is my answer, and the venture it started changed the course of my life.

Title: System for Preventing Petrol Evaporation (SPPE)
Role: Inventor of SPPE · Founder of Greenie Positive
Fields: Invention · prototyping · commercialisation

Problem

Fuel in a parked vehicle doesn't just sit there. Heat drives it into vapour; vapour escapes; the loss is real fuel, real money and real emissions. When repeated across large numbers of vehicles, these losses may become environmentally and economically significant.

Schematic — how heat turns parked fuel into escaping vapour.

Journey

SPPE began as an idea about stopping that loss, and grew the way inventions actually grow: prototypes, lab-scale evaluation, revisions, and the slow work of protection. The invention is patented in Iran. A US provisional patent application was filed in June 2011. Around the invention I founded Greenie Positive to carry SPPE forward; its participation in international startup and development programmes brought both the company and me to the United Kingdom in late 2022. Development continues today through Verdevia, a Canadian company connected to the SPPE initiative — the wider picture sits on the Ventures page.

Reflection

Engineering employment teaches you to finish other people's machines. An invention teaches you what it costs to start your own — and what it takes to keep going when the machine is also a company.