Are Biofuels Part of the Carbon Emissions Solution?

by Neil Briscoe (Irish Times) ... “Ireland has one million petrol vehicles,” James Cogan, Ethanol Europe’s industry and policy adviser told The Irish Times. “E10 allows that fleet to cut emissions by an amount equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road. Or the amount that would be achieved by replacing 100,000 of them with electric cars – at a cost of €1 billion in grants and foregone tax.

“Yes, electric cars will one day outnumber conventional cars, but right now the conventional fleet is still growing much quicker than total sales of EVs in Ireland, in the EU, and everywhere. By the time EVs account for half of the fleet, the fleet could be double its current size. After E10 there is E15, and E85 which is now available in a quarter of France’s petrol stations, and growing rapidly.”

Cogan says that such worries are unfounded, though, and that with E10, there are no such issues. “Absolutely all petrol vehicles and engines – cars, jet skis, gardening equipment – no matter the age, make or model are suited to E10,” said Cogan. “There is much written about this by observers, and much navel gazing, but half a billion vehicles of every imaginable type worldwide have been running on E10 for many years and not a single incident has ever been reported.

“Back in 1978, the US government asked the motor industry if it had any reservations about E10 and it said no. The US has been running on E10 virtually exclusively for over a decade without issues and they are now transitioning to E15. The issue with older engines is only the speculation about older engines, not the actual application which has been proven in the real world on a gargantuan scale.”

There would, says Cogan, also be no issues with people taking tax breaks without actually using the fuel – E10 would, in theory, simply become the standard pump fuel used across the country, and all cars could, in theory, use it so the end-user motorist would need to make no change.

As to the worries over the use of land for growing fuel crops, Cogan is equally reassuring. “The UN IPCC 2019 special report on climate and land confirms that unsustainable use of land is a major risk. But it also confirms the findings of the 2018 IPCC report on keeping warming under 1.5 degrees, that biofuels are essential to successful climate action. It repeatedly stresses therefore, that good regulation on land is necessary” he said.

“In Europe farmers have difficulty getting enough for their crops to make a living. Having a captive market in biofuels is good for them, bringing about 6 billion euros in demand, which is the equivalent to about 12 per cent of CAP.”

Rural renaissance

“When we built our plant in Hungary 10 years ago the local grain was going into state-funded intervention storage. Our operation created real demand for around €150 million of farm crops and several times that figure in value-add in the region. We have created a rural renaissance in the area with thousands of new jobs, much public investment made possible by extra local taxes and other investments following us in.” READ MORE