The European Commission is convinced that biofuel production affects land use which could exacerbate global warming, but it is stumped on how to factor in these unknown and near immeasurable effects.
These are the findings of an EC report on indirect land use change (ILUC), seen as the missing piece in the sustainability rules governing EU biofuel policy.
"The Commission will present the Impact Assessment, if appropriate together with a legislative proposal for amending the Renewable Energy Directive and the Fuel Quality Directive as necessary no later than by July 2011," it concluded.
The decision to defer judgment comes despite Brussels having run 15 studies on different biofuel crops, spanning various departments, and having twice consulted a host of stakeholders on the issue.
ePure, which represents European ethanol producers, welcomed the delay in policy implementation. "At least it may lead to a more balanced review of the various policy options on the table as a result of the public consultation process. The extra time involved will not make the current uncertainty in the market any worse than it already is," said ePure Secretary-General Rob Vierhout.
At the end of 2008, the EU adopted its renewable energy directive (RED), under which member states are required to derive 10 percent of their transport fuels from renewable sources by 2020. The commission decided that in order to qualify for the RED quota, all biofuels would have to fulfill several criteria to ensure their sustainability.
This required biofuels to achieve minimum greenhouse gas emission savings of 35 percent compared to fossil fuels, including cultivation, transport, processing and direct land use change –– when non-agricultural areas are cleared to allow new acreage for agri-fuel production.
However, the EC gave itself until the end of 2010 to decide whether and to what extent to factor in ILUC, a phenomenon said to occur when crops are displaced by biofuel feedstocks to be cultivated elsewhere, causing new land to be brought into arable production and affecting the overall greenhouse gas balance.
In order to hone methods for calculating the ILUC effect, Brussels drew on modeling reports from the International Food Policy Research Institute and from the EU's Joint Research Center, using a pre-developed OECD model, as well as conducting an in-house review of existing literature on ILUC.
However, the report shows that the findings are riddled with contradictions, oversights and conjectures, thus making it impossible at this stage to define a fair and reliable system for calculating ILUC.
U.S. ethanol supporters have long made the same argument when discussing the methodology the Environmental Protection Agency uses to determine potential indirect land use changes and the implications they might have for determining sustainable biofuels in this country.
