The 28 September e-newsletter of the European green transport lobby group Transport & Environment says the European Commission seems ready to accept that setting a general target for the use of biofuels in transport won’t help reduce greenhouse gases. The EC’s long-awaited proposal on indirect land-use change caused by growing biofuel crops, leaked last month, said in draft form that the Commission believes biofuels should only be subsidised after 2020 “if they lead to substantial greenhouse gas savings … and are not produced from crops used for food and feed.”
T&E has long been a vocal critic of EU biofuels mandates encouraging farmers to plant food crops for biofuels which involve increased greenhouse gas emissions from new land having to be found to replace the lost food production, which in turn leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions, in the syndrome that has become known as indirect land-use change (or ‘Iluc’).
T&E says the EC’s apparent recognition of Iluc follows a succession of studies showing that greenhouse gases from producing many biofuels might be higher than those from fossil fuels, and says this is particularly the case for biodiesel derived from rapeseed oil.
Since 2009, the EU has had a target to have 10% of all transport fuels made up of renewable fuels by 2020, and biofuels were expected to make up a large share of this target. But according to the leaked Commission document, biofuels derived from food crops will now be limited to 5% of total EU transport fuels. As they already make up 4.5%, that suggests little more room for growth. The Commission, according to the leaked draft, says its wants non-land-derived biofuels, such as fuel made from household waste and algae, to make up the difference, and is introducing what T&E describes as a “controversial system of double and quadruple accounting” to make this possible.
The draft envisages ending all public subsidies for biofuels produced from food and feed after 2020. T&E biofuels officer Nusa Urbancic said: “It’s important that the Commission appears to be finally addressing the problem and discouraging further expansion of unsustainable biofuels. It will be attacked by the biofuels industry for doing this, but it must stand firm, because even this proposal still fails to fundamentally clean up biofuels. It still does not count Iluc emissions in the Renewable Energy Directive, nor include any Iluc factors for biofuels produced from non-food crops. This is key to giving the right framework for the future development of the sector.”
The draft law is expected to propose new Iluc emissions values for cereals, sugars and oilseeds, which will help calculate a fuel’s potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With a relatively high value expected for fuels derived from oilseeds, fuel producers will be discouraged from using biodiesel towards their decarbonisation target.
Urbancic added: “Decarbonisation targets are set under the EU Fuel Quality Directive, which looks set to including Iluc factors, but Iluc will not feature in the Renewable Energy Directive. This suggests the potential for inconsistency between the EU’s two directives that are supposed to be encouraging cleaner energy. Unless this inconsistency is addressed, we may continue to subsidise biofuels that are worse for the climate than fossil fuels.”
