EU biofuel policy under threat
After a European Commission report issued just before Christmas called into doubt the carbon emission savings from biofuels, it was announced that six months of additional studies will be undertaken, before adjustments to the EU biofuels strategy.
But some experts warn that the commission’s findings so far make continuation of the EU’s renewable energy in transport targets extremely problematic.
“It is hard to see how this policy can survive in the New Year without some extremely clever footwork by the Commission,” said Alan Matthews, Professor of European Agricultural Policy in the Department of Economics, Trinity College.
In his capreform.eu blog, he warned, “If the biofuel targets are suspended, at least until second-generation biofuel technology is fully commercialised, this will have a perceptible dampening effect on the outlook for some agricultural prices for the rest of this decade.”
Uncertainty over biofuels has largely been caused by the “indirect land-use change” ) concept — that if you take a field of grain and switch the crop to biofuel, somebody somewhere will go hungry unless the missing tons of grain are grown elsewhere — such as tropical zones where farmers create new farmland by burning forests, which pumps vast quantities of climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere — enough to cancel any climate benefits for biofuels.
Commission investigations have indicated that EU biofuel policies could indirectly affect a global land area the size of Denmark, over the next decade. If that caused clearing of “wild” land, it could release at least 200 million tons of carbon. Such doubts over the sector’s green credentials — and the challenging investment climate — have slowed investment in European biofuels to a halt.
