Bioenergy | TableDebates

Paper concluding that healthier diets are not necessarily more sustainable than unhealthy diets.

Update: Biofuels and EU Policy Development

In our 24th September Newsletter, we mentioned that the EU is considering plans to limit crop-based biofuels to 5% of transport fuel. Biofuels have been promoted in recent years, largely because of the belief that they will help reduce transport’s impact on the environment, and particularly because of its contribution to climate change. But the indirect effects of growing crops to make fuel have seriously challenged these assumptions.

Biofuels and livestock report by FAO

This report by the FAO examines the important issue of the relationship between biofuel production and livestock: there can be synergies (ie. the use of biofuel co-products as animal feed) and trade offs (such as biofuel production effects on the price of grains).

Study: A model-based quantitative assessment of the carbon benefits of introducing iLUC factors in the European Renewable Energy Directive

This modelling study, published in Global Change Biology, finds that if indirect land use change (iLUC) factors are not accounted for when assessing the GHG balance of biofuels, then “the Renewable Energy Directive could be expected to deliver only a 4% carbon saving compared to fossil fuel, with a 30% chance that it would actually cause a net emissions increase.”

Biofuels and EU policy developments

The EU is considering plans to limit crop-based biofuels to 5% of transport fuel.

Can biofuels policy work for food security?

The Bioenergy Strategy commits the UK Government to further work to investigate the merits of temporarily flexing or otherwise relaxing biofuels mandates at times of agricultural price pressures. The current paper presents work by Defra analysts to explore some of the potential implications of this idea.

Article: bioenergy crop potentials in 2050

This paper points out that the potential for producing bioenergy from crops depends on a great many factors including assumptions about gains in agricultural productivity, patterns of food demand, political stability, policies on biodiversity and so forth.

Crop-based biofuels and associated environmental concerns

This is a useful and readable opinion piece highlighting some fundamental errors in thinking about biofuels.

Report on large scale anaerobic digestion

The Soil Association and the World Society for the Protection of Animals have published a report on anaerobic digestion (biogas) arguing the environmental benefits of large-scale AD units are questionable and may even be damaging.