EU official: Decision to phase out first-gen biofuels based on ‘emotive response’, not facts

The European Commission’s (EC) decision to phase out first-generation biofuels was based on “public opinion” instead of scientific facts, an EU official is quoted as admitting.

According to the EurActive news site, EU director of renewables, research, and energy efficiency Marie Donnelly explained the reasoning behind the decision at a conference on 12 October.

She is quoted as saying that policy makers “cannot just be led by economic models and scientific theories”, but also need to take into account the public’s concerns.

“We have to be very sensitive to the reality of citizens’ concerns, sometimes even if these concerns are emotive rather than factual based or scientific,” she said.

“There are many people in Europe who feel that if we take food and put in our tanks and cars, we are taking food from people who are starving elsewhere in the world.”

Donnelly said that the EC had carried out studies to examine the impact of its policies, but asked her audience to “not confuse her with facts”.

“I believe what I believe, but we have not succeeded in changing that position in the minds of many people in Europe. This is the reality,” she said.

Donnelly also addressed the EC’s indirect land use change (ILUC) study, carried out by Globium, that has been criticised for being published only after the EC decided to do away with conventional biofuels.

The Globium study found ethanol to be a low ILUC biofuel, and as such it would not warrant a complete phase-out.

Donnelly claimed measuring ILUC effects is not a science as they cannot be directly measured and two different scientists would produce two different results, EurActive writes.

“When it comes to assessing direct emissions, it’s the scientific criteria of sustainability, we can feel them, we can touch them, and measure them. You cannot realistically establish a policy that depends on an unstable calculation like [ILUC] and we cannot base our regulation on that, as problems will arise,” she said.

Responding to a question of why the EC did not differentiate ethanol from other biofuels, such as biodiesel, she said the reason was that “both of them come from food”.

“I’m sorry but it’s as simple as that. The first emotive reaction was that you take food off the table of a poor starving child in Africa and you put it into the tank to burn it. That’s why it’s almost impossible to differentiate biodiesel from bioethanol because they are both coming from food products,” she said.

EC ‘out of touch’ with own work

In response to the Donnelly’s admission, Charles-Albert Peers, president of the European renewable ethanol association (ePure), questioned whether the EC was “out of touch” with the public and its own work.

“The EC claims that a phase-out of conventional, or what it has called ‘food-based’, biofuels is what the public want – yet the only EU-wide citizens’ opinion survey ever conducted on biofuels, which was published by the EC itself, showed that 83% of Europeans feel that sustainable biofuels should be encouraged.

“Since the EU introduced its biofuels policy, global food prices have actually dropped while global biofuels production has significantly increased. The EC recognised this in its own Renewable Energy Progress Report,” Peers said.

He also said the “myth” of EU biofuels policy causing land-grabs in Africa has been disproven, as “not a single drop of fuel ethanol” has been imported to the EU from such African projects.

The EC published a European Strategy for Low-Emission Mobility in July, where it outlined its goal to decarbonise the transport sector as part of an EU-wide goal to cut GHG emissions by at least 40% by 2030.

It proposed a “limited” role for food-based biofuels and said they should no longer receive support after 2020.

The executive stressed that food-based biofuels should be gradually phased out and replaced with “more advanced biofuels” that do not compete with food crops, like wood residues, organic waste, or crops grown specifically for energy.

This article was written by Ilari Kauppila, deputy editor at Biofuels International