The Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency — the 27-nation EU’s environment watchdog — warned of a “serious accounting error” in EU and global rules to promote the use of bioenergy, such as biofuels made from food crops.
In its scientific opinion, the committee confirmed the findings of a draft version of the report reported by Reuters earlier this week.
The scientists said EU policymakers made a basic arithmetical error when designing the bloc’s legislation on bioenergy, by assuming that bioenergy only emits as much carbon when burned as the plants used to make it absorbed when growing.
“This assumption in not correct and results in a form of double-counting, as it ignores the fact that using land to produce plants for energy typically means that this land is not producing plants for other purposes,” the scientists said.
EU legislation should only promote the use of bioenergy from plants grown in addition to what would have grown on the land anyway, or from plant-based by-products, waste and residues that would otherwise be left to decompose, they said.
A spokeswoman for EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said on Friday that the Commission was aware of the scientific arguments behind the report, and was of a different opinion to its authors.
“What for us is missing is that (it) does not make a comparison between biofuels and petrol. We believe it’s better to use biofuels than petrol, because biofuels emit much less carbon dioxide,” Marlene Holzner told a news briefing.
But one of the lead authors of the report said the Commission’s response failed to address the key finding, which is that bioenergy can only emit less carbon than fossil fuels if it is made from plants that would not have otherwise been grown.
“I’m a bit astonished at the response, because I can’t imagine that someone who has read this opinion can come to this conclusion,” said panel member Helmut Haberl, Professor of industrial ecology at the Vienna Institute of Social Ecology.
The 19-member scientific panel has no direct say in EU energy policy but its opinion is well respected. The report comes during a tense EU debate over calculating the indirect climate impact biofuels create by diverting food into fuel tanks.
At issue is an emerging concept known as indirect land use change (ILUC), which states that if you divert food crops to biofuel production, someone, somewhere, will go hungry unless those missing tons of grain are grown elsewhere.
If the crops to make up the shortfall are grown on new farmland created by cutting down rainforests or draining peat land, this can release enough climate-warming emissions to cancel out any theoretical emission savings from biofuels.
Minutes of an internal meeting suggested recently that the EU executive had agreed to delay by up to seven years rules that would penalize individual biofuels for their ILUC emissions, saying the scientific uncertainties surrounding the issue were too great.
Instead, some in the Commission have proposed an indirect approach that penalizes all biofuels equally, by raising the carbon-savings threshold that biofuels must meet compared with conventional fossil fuel to count toward the EU’s renewable energy target.
But the panel’s report said this approach would not solve the problem of ILUC, and could actually exacerbate it.
“Tighter thresholds will encourage making biofuels that use more land, and more productive land, if doing so reduces greenhouse gas emissions from inputs such as energy or fertilizer,” the report said.
“If you increase the thresholds based on the wrong accounting, you might favor bioenergy that is worse in terms of its true greenhouse gas emissions,” Haberl told Reuters.
One EU source with knowledge of the latest Commission thinking on ILUC said talk of a deal between the EU’s climate and energy chiefs to delay crop-specific emission factors until 2016 or 2018 was wide of the mark.
“The discussions are still going on. There are some in the Commission who will not accept delaying action until 2018, and will fight to have crop-specific ILUC factors by the end of this Commission in 2014 at the latest,” the source said.
EU rules on ILUC could wipe out producers making biodiesel from European rapeseed, South American soy beans and Asian palm oil, after draft EU studies showed such biodiesel has a bigger overall climate impact that normal diesel.
The Commission is due to present its proposals on ILUC for approval by EU governments and lawmakers before the end of the year.
