Balance and biofuels

Science|Business senior editor Nuala Moran.

Announcing he was leaving the company, Watkin expressed his frustration that the investment community, governments and non-governmental organisations had failed to recognise that D1’s use of oil from the jatropha tree put it in a different league, both morally and environmentally, from peers producing biofuels from food crops.

Jatropha is not without its drawbacks of course, but it has big pros – most notably it will grow on marginal land that is unsuited for food production, and it can be irrigated with wastewater. Using jatropha to produce biofuel is sustainable, using food crops is not.

Biofuels are finding they have a bad reputation in part because of how the US and Europe have seized on them as a cheap technology fix for the problems – economic and environmental – that arise from the current dependency on fossil fuels.

The European Union has been most active in the area, setting a 10 per cent target for the use of these renewables, and offering subsidies and incentives to encourage the development of biorefineries and to drive the market.

At the time it set out to encourage their adoption, biofuels looked like a good disposal route for Europe’s wine/ethanol lake, a way of pulling through new energy technologies and encouraging the productive use of a variety of biomass, ranging from chicken waste to straw, that would otherwise rot unused.

Although these marginal sources of biomass have been employed in some projects, most of the largest plants are using crops including wheat, soya, palm oil, rapeseed, sugar beet and maize as their feedstock.

The increase in demand for biofuels has unfortunately collided with, and is now promoting, a general increase in the price of commodity foodstuffs. To give a colourful example of the problem, the soaring price of durum wheat in Italy is blamed on local farmers opting to plant rapeseed in place of wheat.

More depressingly it is said the soaring market for biofuel feedstock is encouraging yet more despoliation of the world’s rainforests.

Don’t throw it all away

It is morally wrong to use crops to generate biofuel when people and animals are hungry. But rather than abandon their environmental promise, there needs to be a reappraisal of how fast the market is allowed to grow and what feedstock is used. Efforts to develop second-generation biofuels generated from cellulosic sources need to be redoubled.

This week EuropaBio, Europe’s biotechnology industry association and a member of the Science|Business network, made its contribution to steadying the debate, setting the record straight on biofuels and showing how they can contribute to a low-carbon economy.  

“To move towards a future with the needed greenhouse gas savings and energy security, every solution is important. Biofuels contribute in realising these solutions, but it is important that the emerging biofuels sector be built on sound sustainability principles,” said Kirsten Birkegaard Staer, Chair of EuropaBio’s Biofuels Task Force.

EuropaBio set out its “Pillars of sustainability”, which include:

1. The development of a credible and robust certification scheme, on an EU or global basis, to guarantee that biofuels are produced in an environmentally sustainable way.

2. The development of sustainability criteria for the biomass used for biofuel production as well as for all energy applications

3. The insistence that using biomass for fuel should not jeopardise European and third countries’ ability to secure their people’s food supply, nor should it jeopardise the protection of forests and the good ecological status of waters, or prevent soil degradation.

These principles need to be applied swiftly – to put biofuels on a sustainable footing and ensure their low-carbon benefits are secured.