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EU plans biofuel incentive reduction
| European Union (EU) legislators are moving towards agreement on new biofuels legislation. The European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers look set to to reduce incentives for the use and manufacture of first generation biofuel products, reports Keith Nuthall. |
A tentative political agreement has the support of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee, which will cap at 7% by 2020 the amount of transport energy consumption from biofuels made from crops grown on agricultural land. This would replace current legislation within the 2009 Renewable Energy Directive that simply says renewable energy should account for at least 10% of EU transport energy consumption by 2020.
The latest moves have sparked increasing concern about the encouragement of biofuel production on cleared virgin forest land, especially through indirect land use (ILU) change. The new deal, which will also amend the EU’s 2009 Fuel Quality Directive, takes account of that – although it postpones potential additional obstacles to using first generation biofuels until further analysis is completed. Under the deal, fuel suppliers would have to report the estimated level of emissions caused by expansion of agricultural land through additional biofuel production.
The Commission will publish this data and later report back to MEPs and EU ministers on how this could be worked into existing sustainability criteria on what biofuels should be promoted with public money and tax breaks. The new draft legislation also says 0.5% of transport energy should be sourced by 2020 from advanced biofuels, typically made from woody matter and other vegetable waste.
The reforms were to be debated by the full European Parliament in late April, and if approved, will receive a final vote by the EU Council of Ministers. If agreed, EU member states will have to enact the legislation by 2017.
Environment Committee Member and Finnish Liberal MEP Nils Torvalds admitted: ‘It was a very challenging file and we didn’t achieve all we wanted to achieve.’
