13 June 2010
The European Commission on 11 June set out rules to limit the environmental impact of plant-based biofuels, after green groups warned that unregulated use of the products could lead to massive deforestation in Asia and Latin America. The EU in 2007 pledged to draw 10% of its fuel needs from renewable sources by 2020. Boosting the use of fuels from crops such as wheat, maize and sugar-cane is seen as key to meeting that target.
“In the years to come, biofuels are the main alternative to petrol and diesel used in transport, which produces more than 20 % of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the EU. We have to ensure that the biofuels used are also sustainable,” EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said.
The rules are based on a system of voluntary auditing organised and paid for by those companies which market biofuels in the EU. Under the regime, companies which want their fuels to be certified as EU-approved - and therefore eligible for tax breaks and other incentives in EU states - will have to set up audit chains checking every stage of their production, from the farm to the petrol station. Auditors will have, for example, to make sure that the plants used to make the fuel were not grown on land which was cleared of rain forest or other endangered vegetation after January 2008.
Environmental groups have warned that thousands of hectares of rain forest in Malaysia, Indonesia and Latin America could be felled to clear space for EU-bound fuel crops, especially palm oil. “The conversion of a forest to a palm-oil plantation would fall foul of the sustainability requirements,” an EU briefing note said.
Companies will also have to make sure that their biofuels produce at least 35% less greenhouse gas than fossil fuels if they want to benefit from EU certification. Biofuels usually create lower emissions than fossil fuels because the plants from which they come remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But inefficient use can negate that advantage. Palm oil, for example, is only 19% less polluting than fossil fuel if the shredded plants are dumped outside factories to rot and emit gases, EU figures say. If those plants are collected and used as fuel for heating, the figure rises to 56%.
Meanwhile, Gernot Pehnelt of GlobEcon and the author of a recent study, European Policies towards Palm Oil – Setting the Record Straight, criticized Oettinger’s new policy. “Regardless of the announcement today by Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, the Renewable Energy Directive remains discriminatory in its calculations for palm oil. The default assumptions embedded in the Directive about the ecological impact of foreign biofuels reflect politics, not scientific or economic reality,” he wrote
