Biofuels: Sustainable land use instead of land consumption

The discussion about banning internal combustion engines is in full swing at national and the European level, the Union for the Promotion of Oil and Protein Plants (UFOP) said.
Closely related to this is the question of whether the technological focus should be exclusively on electric drives in order to enable sustainable and largely CO2-neutral individual transport.
In addition to eFuels, whose production still needs to be developed fully, sustainable certified biofuels are a measure for decarbonising road transport that has already been introduced in the fuel market and are available in relevant quantities.
In 2021 alone, the blending of up to 7% biodiesel and up to 10% bioethanol in Germany could save over 11 million tonnes of CO2eq, as officially confirmed.
Critics of this use of biofuels from cultivated biomass, which has been established and certified as sustainable since 2010, oftenly adresses "land consumption" when it comes to the use of rapeseed as a raw material for biodiesel production, for example.
The energy supply through biofuels of about 34.3 TWh (2021) corresponds to a total energy supply of about 8,200 wind power plants, which do not have to be built for this output.
Stephan Arens, managing director of UFOP, pointed out in this context that there could be no question of land consumption for biofuel production.
"Rapeseed is the most important domestic oil bearing plant and it is never 'consumed' exclusively for the production of biofuels. Instead of land consumption, we should rather talk about sustainable and comprehensive land use, because each of the approximately 1.2 million hectares of rapeseed currently growing on German fields not only provides oil, but to an even greater extent high-quality protein," Arens said.
"In the discussion about biofuels, it is often ignored that rapeseed grown and processed in this country replaces imported soy meal to a considerable extent. As only seeds may be grown in the EU that have not been genetically modified, this also enables GMO-free milk and meat production."