Questions Raised over EU’s Proposed Advanced Biofuels List

European Union (EU)Feedstocks Field/Orchard/Plantation Crops/Residues Forestry/Wood/Residues/Waste Not Agriculture Opinions Policy Sustainability

March 20, 2018

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by Sarantis Michalopoulos (EurActiv) Not all second-generation biofuels listed by the European Commission are sustainable, critics warn, urging policymakers to use the indirect land use change (ILUC) factor to “clean up” the list.

The Commission’s proposed revision of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) includes a list of second-generation biofuels that are eligible to receive subsidies and can be counted towards the EU’s 2030 objective on renewables.

The list, included in Annex IX of the directive, includes crop co-products such as residues from palm oil, starch co-products, imported used cooking oil (UCO) and sugar molasses.

By and large, these are currently considered agricultural waste. So why not use them for energy, the Commission wondered? After all, they can grow back so they must be a “renewable” source of energy.

Not so fast, environmental campaigners argued. According to the EU’s Waste Framework Directive, waste means “any substance or object which the holder discards or intends or is required to discard”.

But some of the agriculture raw materials listed in the directive’s annex have an alternative economic use, which may exclude them from the definition of waste.

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According to Article 26 of the RED II proposal, advanced biofuels need to fulfil the greenhouse gas emissions saving criteria and not the so-called indirect land use change (ILUC) criteria, which was the Commission’s main argument against first-generation biofuels.

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EU sources told EURACTIV that research has shown that conventional biofuels can cause ILUC because they are produced from food and feed crops which are produced specifically for the purpose of producing biofuels.

According to the same sources, this is not the case for the types of wastes and residues included in Annex IX of the proposal including used cooking oils which are considered as having low ILUC risk.

“While ILUC has clearly been identified as a major concern for conventional crop-based biofuels, ILUC research has shown that ILUC greenhouse gas emission factors identified in the literature vary significantly across biofuel pathways, studies and also within studies,” EU sources said.

Another controversial issue is the emissions savings from advanced biofuels as suggested by the EU executive.

According to the Commission’s own impact assessment, the proposed reduction of conventional biofuels would greatly reduce emissions from indirect land use change and hence greatly contribute to the cost-effectiveness of the policy with respect to reaching its objectives.

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Biofuels produced from feedstock, for which no default values are included in the proposal, would have to achieve at least 70% savings.

However, it’s still unclear where these figures come from as none of the two impact assessments accompanying the Commission’s proposal provide specific data. In addition, the total greenhouse gas emissions (including ILUC) of palm oil residues, molasses, starch co-products or imported UCO has not been calculated.

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For Seán Kelly, an Irish MEP from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), ILUC factors should not be introduced in the criteria for advanced biofuels for two reasons.

Firstly, he said, advanced biofuels are produced with wastes and residues, and research has shown that they, therefore, pose a significantly lower risk of indirect emissions from land conversion.

Secondly, he said significant doubts had been expressed about the reliability of the ILUC modelling used by the Commission, and so to apply this to advanced biofuels would likely “deter the investment needed to develop the technology”. READ MORE

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Excerpt from "Ethanol makers....": For Turley (Mark Turley, CEO of Ethanol Europe), it is “a paradox” that the Commission’s Low-Emission Mobility Strategy identifies biofuels as the most important technology for reducing emissions in road transport but deliberately undermines them in other policy initiatives.

The strategy “shows that by 2050, liquid biofuels would constitute a massive 61% of alternative fuels, while electric cars would achieve just 16%”, Turley said, adding, “The Commission has been finally forced to admit that biofuels are the most important technology for emission reductions.”

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According to Turley, the Commission “listened to a lot of lies” and conflated ethanol with biodiesel and other types of renewable energies, as if all biofuels had the same climate impact.

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Advanced biofuels – produced from bio-waste, agricultural residues or specific energy crops – have not yet reached a stage where they are commercially viable.

“Advanced biofuels are something great, everybody supports them in our industry,” Sievers (Eric Sievers, director of investments at Ethanol Europe) said. “But displacing our biofuels [ethanol] is nothing short of crazy. The purpose of biofuels is not to replace other biofuels but to replace oil,” he pointed out.

Sievers emphasised that the best available science showed that the climate impacts between biodiesel and bioethanol are completely different. Report after report, it has been “absolutely clear” that ethanol and biodiesel have different climate impacts, he said.

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The report (by Ricardo Energy and Environment) also found that higher use of ethanol in Europe could contribute to a 14.1% GHG emission reduction in European transport, even after possible land use change (LUC) emissions have been taken into account.

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Sievers also cited a long-awaited report which he said the EU executive was “hiding”.

In 2011, the Commission received a study from the International Food Research Institute, which made it clear that ethanol had a low indirect land use change (ILUC) impact, Sievers said.

But the results were soon dismissed by EU officials.

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“And so that’s the genesis of the Globiom report: they commissioned very reputable institutions to form a consortium to conduct this research and the result was that it just confirmed that ethanol has very low ILUC impact,” he added.

According to Sievers, it has now been a decade since the Commission has received scientific information suggesting ethanol does not have huge climate savings, and yet it refuses to accept anything about ethanol.

“The Commission was very much looking forward to this report and it was about to come out in 2013. It only came out in February 2016, as a result of legal services forcing DG Energy to release the report,” Sievers said, stressing that it confirmed the climate benefits of conventional ethanol.

“The average greenhouse gas savings of EU-produced ethanol today is 64% for 2015 and we believe that the number will be higher for 2016,” he emphasised.

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EURACTIV asked the European Commission why it did not differentiate bioethanol from biodiesel in its impact assessment, and why the assessment did not include any scenario for increasing the use of ethanol up to 2030. EURACTIV also asked who decides the scenarios used in impact assessment studies.

An EU spokesperson dodged all the questions, only confirming that food-based biofuels will be gradually phased out.

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T&E’s analysis of the European Commission’s latest study on biofuels showed it would increase Europe’s overall transport emissions by almost 4% instead of cutting CO2 emissions. READ MORE