Europe Continues to Get Biodiesel Wrong

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May 06, 2016

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by Ron Kotrba (Biodiesel Magazine) A provocative opinion piece on Europe's reliance on unsound indirect land use change theory -- It is clear there is a politicized agenda in Europe to undermine sustainable, liquid biofuels such as biodiesel and forge a new path toward electrification of transportation. We saw the materialization of this agenda in 2015 with the new rules that came into effect amending current legislation on biofuels in the Renewable Energy and Fuel Quality directives, in which a 7 percent cap on so-called conventional biofuels was put in place while introducing stronger incentives for the use of renewable electricity in transport. The fulfillment of this agenda continues to play out through the manipulation of public perception by way of opaque indirect land use change modeling and biased analyses.

At the behest of the European Commission, IIASA research institute and energy and climate consultancy Ecofys performed a study using the Global Biosphere Management Model (Globiom) to attempt to quantify the impact of indirect land use changes as the result of biofuels consumed in Europe.

Indirect land use change is a questionable pseudoscience modeling approach that, at its core, suggests when agricultural products such as soybean oil are consumed by biofuel production, supply tightens, prices rise and market incentives are provided to essentially establish new cropland to grow comparable products such as palm in order to balance the market. The fear is new cropland is potentially established by the logging—oftentimes illegally—of indigenous rainforest in places such as Indonesia.

The referenced Globiom study and Transport & Environment’s subsequent lifecycle emissions analysis using Globiom’s findings—which haven’t been peer-reviewed and are not open to scientific scrutiny—indicate that when these indirect land use change emissions are taken into account, renewable fuels such as biodiesel are worse than fossil fuels in terms of lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions.

The fact is ILUC is not a science and its use in guiding biofuel policy has been at the heart of heated debate for the better part of a decade—and rightfully so. ILUC is based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of assumptions that can be formulated with consciously or subconsciously biased points of view, and public and private agendas. In fact, the study recognizes this when it states, “There has been an important debate on whether or not LUC emission factors should be used in biofuel policy. Our results show that LUC emissions are likely to be substantial, but some inherent uncertainty cannot be avoided in the estimation of such emissions and many parameters and assumptions influence the results.”

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With all of these known uncertainties in ILUC modeling, why then are we allowing it to drive public policy on biofuels?

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Oil companies want to retain their monopoly. Food and livestock industries want zero competition for cheap grain, feed and grazing lands. And certain environmental groups want to impede progress at any cost, even if that means chastising movements such as biodiesel that, oblivious to them, are on their side, the stymying of which means certain victory for oil and coal.

No other sector has to stand up to the rigors of ILUC’s bad science. Let’s take the sugar industry for example—even at the risk of marginalizing my farmer-neighbors in the upper Midwest who grow sugar beets, and my factory-neighbors who work in the many sugar processing facilities dotting the landscape here. What more nutrition-less, destructive crop can there be? Here we have a product for which profit-driven candy and sweet-goods companies are constantly and successfully expanding their markets, despite the rampant obesity and diabetes problems in the U.S., and yet these farmers, companies and the sector as a whole are not even held responsible for the direct impacts their products have on society, let alone uncertain indirect land use changes halfway across the globe. Think of all the kale or spinach that could be grown on those lands. Socially noble causes such as biofuels are shamed while indulgent, health-wrecking sugar is heralded as a job creator and wealth builder for farmers and factory workers.

What about the proliferation of fast-food restaurants in the U.S. and around the world? Their consumption of fryer oil is massive, yet as chains continue to pop up across the U.S. in developing countries, the expansion is lauded as progress despite how harmful consumption of fast food has been shown to be.

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In case study 144 on its website, Birdlife International states:

“Indonesia was still densely forested as recently as 1950, but between then and 2000 c.40 percent of the country’s forests was cleared (FWI/GFW 2002), and this rate of loss is accelerating (see figure). Approximately 10,000 km2 of forest were cleared annually in the 1980s, rising to c.17,000 km2 per year in the early 1990s. Since 1996, deforestation has increased to an average rate of 20,000 km2 per year. These losses are concentrated on nonswamp lowland forest, the type richest in biodiversity. Between 1985 and 1997, Sumatra lost 29 percent of its forests, and Kalimantan 22 percent (Holmes 2000). ... This growth has been achieved mainly through illegal logging and land clearance. Around 73 percent of log production in Indonesia is illegal and occurs outside designated forestry concessions (Holmes 2000). "

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Let’s hold nations that support destruction of virgin forests accountable by sanctions or other economic measures. Let’s put pressure on these nations to establish robust environmental defense initiatives and enforce the laws already on the books to curb illegal deforestation, and encourage penalizing the parties responsible.

The Globiom study states that, “If … deforestation and peatland drainage in Indonesia and Malaysia could be avoided by introducing appropriate environmental safeguard systems, LUC emissions for palm oil, soybean oil and other vegetable oils would strongly decrease. These effects should be kept in mind when discussing the emission impacts of current biofuel policy.”

Stop buying products from companies that establish crops on newly deforested lands. Market-based initiatives to make this happen already exist through programs like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials, to name a few. And government programs such as the U.S.’s renewable fuel standard (RFS) disincentivize palm biodiesel by, for one, attributing lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions reductions that are not low enough to meet the threshold for desirable D4 RIN generation, and two, establishing that the land on which the biofuel crop was grown must have been in cultivation prior to 2008.

If we must accept the fact that ILUC has become part of the equation, how can Europe ignore the fact that several reputable governments and organizations have conducted extensive, highly scrutinized, peer-reviewed, publicly open, transparent, and scientifically sound lifecycle analyses on biofuels?

The U.S. EPA quantifies soy biodiesel at more than 50 percent reduction in GHG emissions relative to 2005 diesel—and experts say today’s diesel is about 10 percent worse in GHG emissions than 2005’s.

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“By ignoring the lack of credibility of the Globiom modeling, and calling for a 0 percent cap on first-generation biofuels after 2020, Transport & Environment is actually advocating for more fossil fuels in road transport. ..." (European Biodiesel Board)

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“We are surprised about the fact that Transport & Environment focuses on unreliable studies such as Globiom, but ignore the study on ILUC done by CARB, which identified biodiesel as the best performing GHG biofuel,” says Raffaello Garofalo, secretary general of the EBB.

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The fact is, not a lot is known about the Globiom study. The information behind the study cannot be reviewed publically, so we are left to guess at its assumptions. Does it account for coproducts, or does soybean oil, for instance, get all the impacts though it should only get 20 percent? Does it assign additional penalties because the soy meal competes with EU-produced protein sources?

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Ultimately, if incorporation of the clearly questionable ILUC theory is forevermore to be part of biofuel analysis, then what is good for biofuels must be also good for oil, food, sugar and electrification of transportation. No longer should the societal costs of fossil fuel be externalized. And with all of the technological shortcomings of electric transport, use of electricity—renewable or not—displaces current, more conventional power uses, leaving the market begging for additional supply that may come through coal, nuclear or other undesirable means. READ MORE