EU fuels directive leader slams biofuel mandates

Diesel Fuel News, June 10, 2002 by Robert Gough

Brussels -- The biofuel mandate now being considered by the European Commission is the result of intense lobbying by the biofuel industry and is not based on sound environmental science, said Heidi Hautala, the official fuels directive rapporteur and member of the European Parliament.

The EC should reconsider its biofuel mandate that calls for 2% of the fuel supply to be biofuels by 2005 and 5.75% by 2010, Hautala told attendees of the Hart World Fuels Conference here.

"This all sounds good and progressive but not to my surprise the whole environmental community is extremely critical of how this has been put forward," Hautala said. "I'm sure there will always be good reasons to promote biofuels and also in transport, but the way the commission has proposed to do it is simply going to lead to some severe problems."

Rather than benefit the environment, a biofuel mandate may instead cause ecological harm, Hautala noted. "My personal view is it would lead to the growing use of environment-damaging monocultures and certainly lower environmental standards," she said, "since a cost-effective efficient way of producing biofuels would certainly require use of pesticides, possibly genetically modified varieties."

Plus, "the areas required [for feedstock production] would be huge and would require a lot of set-aside lands," Hautala said. Further, biofuels suffer from a relatively high cost per tonne of [CO.sub.2] reduction compared to engine and fuel reformulation technology improvements, she said.

"We are, by far, not at the end of the improvements" that can be made to petroleum and diesel to address [CO.sub.2], agreed Axel Friedrich, head of Germany's Umwelt Bundes Amt (equivalent to U.S. EPA) division of Transport, Environment and Noise. "The costs are and will be for the next 30 years far lower than biodiesel."

The EC calculates Kyoto Protocol compliance will cost (Euro)$20 per tonne of [CO.sub.2] equivalent, Friedrich pointed out. But the EC also says biodiesel production will cost Euro$100 /tonne of [CO.sub.2] -- a figure five times higher, he added.

And biodiesel's costs reach beyond capital outlay, Friedrich said. "It is ethically problematic thinking to use our cars and trucks in fields that can supply food for which other people are starving to death," he said.

Biofuel feedstock production poses "competition for land that could be used for nature protection," he added. And NOx emissions increase, as for example when rapeseed methyl ester (RME) was tested in a Volkswagen diesel engine. "That means this car is not able to make Euro-IV standards," Friedrich said.

"Of course we can change this by resetting the engine but who would like to do it?" (This would increase PM/HC emission in exchange, and penalize fuel economy and [CO.sub.2])

The biofuels mandate controversy appears to be turning out to be a regional conflict -- splitting the European Union between member-states in the South that have much more land to produce biofuel feedstocks and those in the North, which do not.

This regional split on the issue mirrors that of the U.S. where Midwestern states are pitted against Northeast and West Coast states over the ethanol mandate contained in the U.S. Senate energy bill.

"It is a bit of a gap," Hautala said. But what is the solution? "If we allow for indicative targets instead of mandatory targets it would allow for flexibility," Hautala offered.

In the transport sector, "reduction of consumption is 30 times more fuel-efficient than the use of rapeseed oil to reduce greenhouse gas," Friedrich said. Biofuel is "much more suitable to use in stationary applications," he concluded.

Is the biofuel mandate a done deal? Quite possibly, said Friedrich. Earlier last month, "I was two hours in the Parliament; I've not heard so many lies in two hours as I've heard in this meeting," he said.

"It's a political game. We are fighting (Euro)$10 billion/year [biofuel industry]," Friedrich said. "And for this amount of money a lot of things are moved ... I would like to ask.. the Commission to run an economic model.

"I think in our case, we'll have an increase in unemployment. This is not the best solution."