14 January 2008
The proposals, to be unveiled next week, are aimed at enhancing the environmental credentials of biofuels like biodiesel or ethanol to counter concerns that European drivers are playing a role in destroying wetlands, forests and grasslands in areas like Southeast Asia or Latin America each time they fill up their tanks.
In its draft, the EU requires that biofuels from crops grown on some kinds of land covered in forest, wetlands and grasslands as of January 2008 should be banned for use in the 27-nation bloc. The commission also would require that biofuels used in Europe should deliver "a minimum level of greenhouse gas savings."
The text, which could change before European commissioners meet Jan. 23 to adopt a final version, also emphasizes that areas like rainforests and lands with high levels of biodiversity should not be converted to growing biofuels.
At the same time, the EU does not want to abandon biofuels because of the contribution they could still make to increasing Europe's energy independence.
"The problem is that we have no alternative to oil at the moment, and 90 percent of our transport in Europe depends on oil, making us extremely vulnerable to foreign supplies," said Ferran Tarradellas Espuny, the spokesman for the EU energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs.
Europe is drafting its rules on biofuels amid rising prices for gasoline and diesel and growing worries about climate change across the world. In recent years, a number of countries have started growing and using fuels produced from plants or agricultural waste.
In the United States, ethanol produced from corn has boomed, as has sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil. In Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States, vegetable oils have been converted into a type of diesel fuel by a simple chemical procedure.
In principle, these biofuels promise not only to displace imported oil but also to lower the amount of greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere. The crops absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow, and the fuels made from them re-emit that same gas when they are burned a few months later.
But it is turning out that fuel crops hold the potential for considerable environmental harm.
Not only is native vegetation, including tropical rain forest, being chopped down in some cases to plant the crops, but the crops also are often grown using fossil fuels like diesel for tractors - and they demand nitrogen fertilizer made largely with natural gas.
Moreover, turning the crops into fuels can demand huge amounts of water.
Experts say certain types of fuels, particularly those made from agricultural wastes, still hold potential to improve the environment. But it is only now becoming clear that to achieve that goal, governments will have to set and enforce standards for how the fuels are produced.
With its new proposal, Europe appears to be moving ahead of the rest of the world in that task.
In part that is because biofuels - a blanket term covering fuels grown from crops to manufacture substitutes for diesel and gasoline - are the main weapon foreseen by the EU to lower emissions from the transport sector, which has the fastest growing levels of greenhouse gases among all sectors of its economy.
The increasingly negative image of biofuels has left officials pulled in separate directions - on the one hand trying to clean up the market for biofuels that cause environmental damage while, on the other hand, seeking to rehabilitate biofuels to meet ambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets that have made Europe a world leader in tackling climate change.
The draft EU rules probably would have the biggest effect on growers of palm oil in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, according to Matt Drinkwater, a biofuels analyst with New Energy Finance in London.
"Some proposed developments in Southeast Asia will almost certainly be blocked by these provisions," he said, explaining that the rules would make it much harder to plant on recently cleared land or export fuels to Europe that emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases produced during the process of manufacturing biodiesel from palm oil.
Growers of crops to produce ethanol - a substitute for gasoline that is more commonly used in the United States than in Europe - also could be affected because the EU rules contain previsions on preserving grasslands, said Drinkwater. Crops for ethanol are grown widely in parts of South America, including Brazil.
On Monday, an organization representing major growers of crops for biofuels in Malaysia said the EU should be cautious before imposing new rules. It said that farmers in the region were adopting more sustainable practices, and warned that restrictions on imports could trigger trade tensions.
"The Malaysian government is very concerned about the EU scheme for sustainability of biofuels," said Zainuddin Hassan, the manager in Europe for the Malaysian Palm Oil Council in Brussels. The measures "should not be a trade barrier to the palm oil industry and it should comply with the WTO rules as well," he said, referring to the World Trade Organization.
Verifying that only environmentally sound biofuels are being imported into Europe would be left to individual countries. But the draft law calls for penalties for violating the rules, like exclusion from tax breaks, to be uniform across the region.
The draft law also says that biofuels should be physically tracked "so that biofuels fulfilling the sustainability criteria can be identified and rewarded with a premium in the market."
The measures are part of a plan for Europe to implement a binding target of making 10 percent of the transport fuels consumed by 2020 from renewable sources - most of which are expected to be biofuels.
Espuny, the spokesman for the EU energy commissioner, said that European countries that used even more than 10 percent of biofuels in their transport fuels mix could use their progress to help them to reach other important EU targets. Those include an overall binding target of a 20 percent share of renewable sources in energy consumption by 2020.
Europe already has a suggested target of making synthetic fuels 5.75 percent of fuels used for transport by 2010. But that target was not going to be met, according to the draft law. Biofuels contributed just 1 percent of fuel transport in 2005 and on present trends would account for 4.2 percent by 2010.
Currently, most of the crops for biofuels used in Europe consist of rapeseed for biodiesel grown in parts of Europe, according to Drinkwater, the analyst at New Energy Finance. Other crops for biodiesel include palm oil from Southeast Asia and soy from Latin America. Europe also imports some ethanol from Brazil made from sugar cane, and produces some ethanol domestically using wheat and sugar beat, he said.
A flurry of studies has discredited some of the claims made by biofuels producers claiming that the fuels help substantially to reduce greenhouse gases by producing fuels from crops that absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.
The growing demands for biofuels mean that millions of hectares of land need to be opened up to meet the global demand for palm oil, according to Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth.
Already, the draining and deforesting of peatlands in Southeast Asia mainly to make way for palm plantations accounts for up to 8 percent of global annual carbon dioxide emissions, Bebb said.
In Indonesia, where more than 18 million hectares, or 44 million acres, of forest have already been cleared for palm oil developments, wildlife like the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger are under threat, and indigenous people mainly dependant on forests and natural resource goods and services have been expropriated, he said.
The latest broadside against biofuels came Monday, from the Royal Society, a national science academy in Britain. It said requirements to use a certain percentage of biofuels were not sufficient. Instead, the society said, there should be specific targets for emissions reductions.
"The greenhouse gas savings of each depends on how crops are grown and converted and how the fuel is used," said John Pickett, head of biological chemistry at Rothamsted Research, a research center in Britain, who helped write to report for the Royal Society. "So, indiscriminately increasing the amount of biofuels we are using may not automatically lead to the best reductions in emissions."
Last week scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute warned that biofuels production could result in environmental destruction, pollution and damage to human health.
The Smithsonian cited a Swiss study showing that fuels made from U.S. corn, Brazilian soy and Malaysian palm oil may even be worse overall than fossil fuels. The best alternatives, according to the Swiss study, include biofuels from residual products, like recycled cooking oil and ethanol from grass or wood.
Even so, the Smithsonian scientists said biofuels could still have a promising future.
"Different biofuels vary enormously in how eco-friendly they are," said William Laurance, a staff scientist at the institute. "We need to be smart and promote the right biofuels."
