Europe’s Broken Biofuels Policy

by Dick Roche (EurActiv) Public policy should be built on firm foundations. Objective analysis, verifiable facts and solid science are good starting points, but that was absent in biofuels policy-making, writes Dick Roche.

The foundations on which Europe’s biofuel policy has been built are anything but firm: objective analysis, facts and solid science have been conspicuous by their absence.

On 20^th July, the EU Commission launched the ‘European Strategy for low Emission Mobility’ focused on reducing transport emissions in the post 2020 period.

Given the implacable opposition to all conventional biofuels within the Commission’s bureaucracy it is no surprise that the policy aims to phase out the EU targets for conventional biofuels post 2020: a case of never mind the facts, analysis, experience or indeed the science – just listen to the mandarins!

Before EU Governments plunge into the next biofuels debate they need to take a long hard look at how appallingly those same bureaucrats have performed on the issue to date.

In the 2012 press conference to announce dramatic alterations to the Renewable Energy Directive(RED), Commissioner Hedegaard referred to some biofuels being worse than fossil fuels spoke about carbon sinks being destroyed to grow biofuel feedstock and flagged her concerns about global land conversion impacts – ILUC.

In an extraordinarily negative presentation the Commissioner failed to mention that all ethanol produced in Europe from European feedstock is superior to all fossil fuels, forgot to mention that sustainable EU produced biofuel feedstocks do not involve carbon sink destruction and omitted to mention that across Europe it is the norm to produce biofuels in a way that is sustainable with negligible ILUC implications.

It concludes that “many of the farm related jobs would probably have existed if the alternative to biofuels is more EU crop exports’. No evidence to support the existence of untapped export markets is supplied.

The report suggests that job creation in biofuels should be ‘discounted’ by the number of job reductions in fossil fuels: a line missing when the benefits of electric cars are discussed.

Ignoring the fact that most Member States have abolished excise tax exemptions for biofuels the JRC argues that taxation arrangements supporting biofuels may lead to job losses in other sectors. The JRC fails to mention that ethanol is the most heavily taxed fuel in the EU or that the French Cour de Comptes found that far from losing tax take with biofuels State tax revenues increased.

Reading through the ILUC Quantification Study it becomes obvious why Commission officials wanted it supressed: its findings run directly counter to the direction of travel being taken by EU Commission officials for years.

The study concludes that increased demand for ethanol produced from sugar, starch crops and cellulosic biomass can be met with low impacts on land use change and low resultant land use change emissions. It rejects the view that ethanol produced from sugars or starch will impact food prices. It concludes that the risk of land use change impacts tend to zero where abandoned land is available and the potential for higher productivity exists – a point of particular interest to EU Member States in Central & Eastern Europe which have significant underutilised land available.

The study reaches an uncompromising conclusion on the use of palm oil suggesting that Europe could play its part by banning palm oil imports for biofuel and curtailing imports for areas such as cosmetics and confectionary: it does not have to close down its biofuel industry. READ MORE