Sustainable Biofuels Highlighted as Key for Future Transport Needs
(Click Green) The Transport Energy Task Force has today highlighted the important role sustainable biofuels will play in meeting the UK’s future transport needs, in its concluding report.
The report identified that there is a clear role for sustainable biofuels over the medium to longer term and at least to 2030 when fossil transport fuels will still be dominant. It also called for a “robust and long-term route for ensuring the sustainability of all transport energy including biofuels”.
The Transport Energy Task Force, set up by the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership (LowCVP), was established as a mechanism for stakeholders to help the Government to examine and formulate options for policy regarding transport energy.
Specifically, the Task Force’s role was to exploreoptions for meeting the 2020 renewable transport target and the role of biofuels in decarbonising UK transport by 2030.
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The report agreed the following points:
* We should support biofuels with a low risk of indirect impacts on other land based industries and activities
* Using wastes as feedstocks is beneficial and sustainable, although care needs to be taken that the same wastes are not being claimed several times over in different sectors
* A 10 per cent bioethanol blend in petrol is a key option to meet transport energy targets and this should come from current UK bioethanol facilities which support several thousand jobs in the UK
* The UK is well placed to develop thought leadership on what a sustainable biofuel is
* Investors in our future fuel portfolio, including advanced biofuels, need market certainty to give confidence that the investment will make a reasonable return
* There is still a need to sort out how to define and mitigate risk to everyone’s satisfaction, but an interim response may be to impose limits on fuels that may be perceived as higher risk
* The European Parliament and Council are currently negotiating the most appropriate level for this limit.
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Friends of the Earth’s biofuel campaigner, Kenneth Richter, commented: “Key disagreements at the heart of taskforce remain unresolved such as the definition of “sustainable biofuels”. Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, RSPB, Action Aid and Oxfam have jointly called for a phase out of policies that encourage the use of crop-based biofuels because of their negative social and environmental impacts.
“We strongly oppose the introduction of a 10% biofuel blend in petrol (E10) at British petrol stations.” READ MORE
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