BIOENERGY TARGETS BASED ON FLAWED SCIENCE, REPORT SHOWS
Existing targets for biofuels and other forms of bioenergy are based on flawed carbon accounting and should be revised downwards, a draft report by a panel of 19 top European scientists showed recently. "It is widely assumed that bioenergy is inherently carbon-neutral -- however this assumption is flawed," said the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency (EEA), the EU's environment watchdog.
The report by the EEA's scientific committee goes one step further, saying that policymakers made a basic mathematical error at the start, crediting both liquid and solid fuels with more carbon-savings than they merit. The basic assumption with bioenergy -- whether bioethanol used in cars or woodchips burned in power stations -- is that it only emits as much carbon when burned as the plants used to make it absorbed when growing. If you use them as a fuel, their net impact on the carbon-balance of the climate is zero, except for emissions from farming and processing the energy crop.
But the scientific committee said that basic theory omitted to make a comparison with the business-as-usual scenario of plant growth. "Plants do absorb carbon, but this thinking makes a 'baseline' error because it fails to recognize that if bioenergy were not produced, land would typically grow plants anyway, and those plants would absorb carbon," it said. The only true carbon savings are those made above and beyond the natural level of carbon sequestration in nature or crop cultivation. What matters is additional plant growth. The panel called on the EU to revise its bioenergy laws to make intelligent use of the best-performing biofuels.
Biofuels accounted for about 20 percent of sugar cane use in 2007-2009 and 9 percent of oilseeds and coarse grains, according to the study.
The EU has a target to increase the share of renewables in final energy use to 20 percent by 2020, and current forecasts suggest that energy from trees and other vegetation will account for 60 percent of all renewable energy by that date. A separate EU target seeks to raise the use of biofuels in road transport to about 10 percent by the end of this decade.
The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a federation of more than 140 environment groups, said the opinion confirmed the findings of its 2010 report "Bioenergy: a Carbon Accounting Time Bomb."
