Advanced BioFuels USA

by Neil Briscoe (Irish Times)  Report argues that biofuels are critical to meeting 2030 targets, but some are sceptical — … While much of the focus on emissions reduction is on the transport sector, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent report into CO2 emissions in Ireland, agriculture continues to makes up the biggest chunk of national emissions – 35.4 per cent, against transport’s 20.4 per cent.

Many would argue that the focus on transport is only right and proper – after all, not only is it arguably better to spend our carbon budget on feeding people than on driving around, but making cuts in transport emissions is potentially easier than it is in agriculture. You can’t convert cows to battery power, after all.

There is a potential third way, though, and one that combines both agriculture and transport into one – biofuels.

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 The EU has introduced regulations that demand a certain level of biofuels in regular pump petrol and diesel – currently, all Irish fuels include a 5 per cent biofuel blend in E5 unleaded petrol.

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Indeed, according to the Irish Bioenergy Association (IrBEA), biofuels are actually the unsung heroes of what emissions reductions Ireland has thus far been able to achieve. The group’s figures indicate that biofuels make up 98 per cent of all of the renewable energy we currently use (the remaining 2 per cent is renewable electricity) and that in 2020, biofuel use helped the country to avoid some 520,000-tonnes of CO2 emissions.

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He (Dr Paul Deane of UCC) is co-author of a report for the IrBEA, which suggests a major expansion of biofuel use is critical to achieving the 50 per cent cut in emissions by 2030, which was promised in the Government’s climate action plan. Indeed, since the publication of the plan, the Government has confirmed a commitment to ramp up biofuel use. In January, the blending obligation will go from 11 per cent to 13 per cent of all fuels used.

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Could Ireland become self-sufficient in biofuels? James Cogan, head of EU and Ireland governmental affairs for Ethanol Europe, reckons it is possible. The IrBEA’s ambition is to increase biofuel’s contribution to transport energy consumption from 5 per cent now to 35 per cent.

That’s not, incidentally, as a potential substitute for converting the national car fleet to electric power, but as an adjunct to it. After all, even if the Government’s lofty ambition of putting almost one million electric cars on the road by 2030 is met, that will still leave another million or so combustion-engine cars running around. The more biofuel that’s being used by those cars, the better it is for emissions.

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In addition, Cogan says there is a huge opportunity for Ireland’s farmers when it comes to biofuel, and not just in making the fuel itself. “It’s not so much because we want to produce ethanol in Ireland for Ireland’s bioenergy demand, even though that would be an important part of the mix of the project. It’s because the whole industry has moved on in the last few years from producing biofuel plus low-grade protein food feed.

“So, tonne-for-tonne, we produce equal amounts of feed and fuel, but we’ve moved on to producing high-grade, human-oriented plant proteins. Those come not from the bits of the plants that go into the fuel – the fuel uses the starch and the sugar, and then the protein and the fibre is going into ever-higher grades of food. That has become the key business case in what we do and that would mean it would be viable and very attractive to do it in Ireland.”

Such a combined production process – making fuels and food from the same crops – could potentially answer one of the biggest criticisms of biofuels: that they take arable land space away from crops that are needed for food. That, it seems, is not the case.

Cogan explains: “The amount of crops and tillage lands that are devoted to biofuels is tiny. It’s in the kind of low single digits, around 1 or 2 per cent, maybe 3 per cent if we’re being conservative. And bear in mind that every year the area of tillage land in Europe reduces by about 2 per cent while the output goes up by 2 per cent. So the impact of biofuels on the whole dynamic is negligible.”  READ MORE