Queenstown tourism operators are scrambling to establish a viable local biofuel industry before government assistance expires.

The Queenstown Lakes Biodiesel Consortium’s pilot scheme has been the beneficiary of a two-year government manufacturing subsidy of 42.5c a litre, which has kept pump prices down to just one or two cents more than regular fuel.

The weird and wonderful sideshow to the Copenhagen summit continues to spread its reach – all in the good name of climate change.

The latest to jump on to a marketing opportunity is petrol company, Gull, offering an eight cents a litre discount on biofuels sold from this morning to 10am Friday - to "coincide" with the summit.

Besides offering discounts on its 98 octane and 91 octane products containing 10 percent bio ethanol, general manager Dave Bodger had a few other pearls of wisdom for the energy consumer.

Government support will be needed to get a local biofuels industry up and running, ANZ Infrastructure Services (ANZIS) managing director John Clarke says.

But "support" is almost the wrong word for it, he says. Any potential initiatives can instead be seen as a corrective force against the failure to price the environmental cost of conventional fuel.