Reuters reported on 17 October that the European Commission had watered down proposals to reduce the indirect climate change impacts of biofuels from changes of land use, but was maintaining a reduced, 5% limit for crop-based biofuels’ total contribution to EU transport fuel demand by 2020. According to Reuters, a leaked document notes: “The share of energy from biofuels produced from cereal and other starch rich crops, sugars and oil crops shall be no more than 5% … of the final consumption of energy in transport in 2020.” The EU’s current goal mandates a 10% transport fuel share for renewables by 2020.
The late changes to draft EU legislation entail that fuel suppliers will not, as originally planned, be held accountable for the climate change effects of land use change, although the draft European legislation will still reportedly require Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) data to be reported. ILUC describes the greenhouse gas emissions effects of clearing forests or draining non-agricultural peatland to provide acreage for biofuel crops.
The plan to limit use of crop-based biofuels to 5% of total EU transport energy demand by 2020 represents a virtual halving of the bloc’s current goal, which mandates a 10% share of renewables in transport by the end of the decade.
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 an earlier leaked Commission document discussed on 25 September by the Brussels-based green transport lobby group T&E, the Commission wants not only to halve the target to 5% (biofuels already accounting for 4.5% in practice) but also for non-land-derived biofuels such as fuel made from household waste and algae to expand the biofuel market at crop feedstocks’ expense, and plans 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.”
T&E expected the draft leglislation to propose new ILUC emissions values for cereals, sugars and oilseeds to help calculate a fuel’s potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that with a relatively high value expected for fuels derived from oilseeds, fuel producers will be discouraged to use biodiesel towards their 5% target.
