The EU Aims for Bioeconomy Perfect, by Tossing out the Good

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... (T)he EU has put itself on a fast-track to limit, if not abandon, first-generation biofuels and focus almost exclusively for its carbon future on advanced biofuels.

Europe has a lot of fog, and nowhere can you see it better than inside a European Commission position paper. They are written in an obscure dialect of English called Brusselese, which is unintelligible to most English-speakers.

We want to match our incentives with the technologies that drive down carbon the most, by 2050.

Goodbye to incentives to any technology that does not make our approved list, but those that do can make a boatload of money.

Well, this sucks. No matter how much we deploy wind and solar, we Europeans have to work on transport. We’d rather set our hair on fire. Since we have to do something, we’ll support transformative technologies from Tomorrowland, rather than the first-gen tech we encouraged everyone to build the last time we thought this through.

We haven’t decided whether we will copy the Renewable Fuel Standard of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard; we’ll get back to you on that one. But hopefully you’ll build lots of tech stuff while we’re thinking about it, so we can pull the rug from under you, too.

First-gen, you’re history. Thanks for playing “spin the policy wheel with the European Union”. We’ll be back after this commercial message from our sponsors, the United Brotherhood of Big Oil, Big Food, and “We Are the NGOs that Killed Big Palm”.

You better make jet fuel and renewable diesel, bro’. And don’t count on diesel because we like natural gas so much that you can disregard any comments we make about targeting towards the lowest carbon emissions possible.

Well, the Soviet of Brussels has spoken, and unless the EU member parliaments rise in a fury, they might get their way. Should that happen, look for most sugar-based fermentation strategies aim towards chemicals and existing ethanol capacity might well retrofit for alcohol-to-jet technology. READ MORE and MORE (Biofuels International)