Waste-Based Biofuels Sector Needs Smarter EU 2030 Package to Realize Its High Potential
(UPM/GlobeNewsWire) UPM participated together with a coalition of technology innovators and green NGOs to a project which results were published today. Europe has a significant untapped potential for converting wastes from farming, forestry, industry and households to advanced low-carbon biofuels, but only if it sets a strong sustainability framework and ambitious decarbonisation targets for transport fuels in 2030, finds a new report entitled “Wasted: Europe’s Untapped Resource.”
The project found that if all sustainable waste from farms, forests, households and industry were used for transport fuels, there could be sufficient fuel to displace about 37 million tonnes of oil annually by 2030. To put this in context, this technical potential would be equal to 16 per cent of road transport fuel demand in 2030.
According to Marko Janhunen, Vice President, Stakeholder Relations, UPM Biorefining, UPM will open the world’s first biorefinery producing wood-based renewable diesel at commercial scale this summer, and our annual production will be 100,000 tons. Such investments make the EU’s bioeconomy real, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and offer jobs and growth. A stable policy framework is extremely important to ensure further investments in advanced biofuels. We call for a strong investment signal from the EU member states and the Parliament.”
“Even when taking account of possible indirect emissions, alternative fuels from wastes and residues offer real and substantial carbon savings,” said Chris Malins who led the analysis for the International Council on Clean Transportation. “The resource is available, and the technology exists – the challenge now is for Europe to put a policy framework in place that allows rapid investment.”
Scaling up the industry to this highest technical potential could create up to 300,000 direct jobs across Europe in construction, refining and waste collection between now and 2030 (not including indirect employment impacts). It could also provide an alternative to declining fossil fuel reserves and significantly cut Europe’s growing transport emissions, which are destined to become the single biggest source of CO2 by 2030.
David Turley of the UK research consultancy NNFCC, who led the economic analysis, said: “Our analysis indicates that once deployed at scale, advanced biofuels from agricultural and forest residue feedstocks would require little or only a modest additional incentive to stimulate production at prices comparable to that of current crop-fuelled technologies.”
However, EU policy uncertainty, especially around the decarbonisation of transport fuels, is blocking these innovations from reaching their full potential, says “Wasted: Europe’s Untapped Resource”. READ MORE and MORE (Biomass Magazine) and MORE (Think Progress) and MORE (The Guardian) and MORE (Business Green) Download study
