Fierce lobbying on biofuels criteria as EU cap passed

The bête noire of the bioethanol and biodiesel industry, Timothy Searchinger, argues that their use increases world hunger.

MEPs voted 43-26 in favour of a 5.5% cap on European support for biofuels, as new research showed that growing fuel crops in place of food creates more hunger and deforestation.

Today’s vote was on whether to endorse a strict cap on crop-based biofuels, to curb emissions from ‘indirect land use change’ (ILUC) caused by, for example, the clearing of forest to grow palms for oil.

Lobbying is fierce on all sides of the argument, as parts of the biofuels industry that have invested billions in securing first and second generation biofuel sources, now found to be harmful, fight to preserve the status quo. But other parts are in favour of the move and want it tightening further.

On the side against the cap are MPs in Humberside and East Yorkshire, where some of these companies are based, who are backing a campaign by the biofuel industry trade organisation, the Renewable Energy Association (REA).

REA's Head of Renewable Transport, Clare Wenner, argued: “If it was mandatory for all land-using industries to account for emissions from the direct conversion of land from one use to another, as the biofuels industry does already, then there would be no such thing as indirect land use change."

But new research throws up an additional problem: when agricultural land that has been used to grow food is converted to biofuels, food prices will go up causing some people to go hungry unless previously uncultivated land is made productive.

The research, by Princeton University researcher Timothy Searchinger (known as ‘the godfather of ILUC’), says, in his words: "Biofuels have almost doubled the rate of growth in demand for food, and the system is having a hard time keeping up. If demand growth stopped, prices would come down as farmers caught up, although their efforts to catch up will cause more land use change."

His latest analysis, produced with the help of the EU’s Joint Research Centre, of a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), found that of every 100 calories from wheat or maize diverted to food tanks by bioethanol production, 25 calories were not replaced.

The European Renewable Ethanol Association, is also against the cap. “I wouldn’t expect anything good to come out of Searchinger,” said Rob Vierhout, its secretary-general. “Whatever he says, he is biased. He is not even a scientist. He is a lawyer and could defend any position you want him to.”

In a previous life, Searchinger was an attorney for the Environmental Defence Fund, and wrote a prize-winning book on wetlands that led work to protect the Everglades and Mississippi river.

Another lobby group, composed of the Chief Executive Officers of leading European biofuel producers and European airlines, called 'The Leaders of Sustainable Biofuels', is in favour of the cap and wants to ensure the market uptake of advanced sustainable biofuels by all transport sectors.

It issued a statement supporting EU policy to gradually phase in less harmful third generation biofuels and supporting the ILUC principle.

But it foresees a further threat lurking in a proposed extended list of feedstock that would be eligible for support as advanced biofuels, namely the use of animal fats and used cooking oil, palm oil residue/waste and any other food feedstock waste.

It says that were used palm oil to be supported in this way, it would be "absurd and counter-productive to the objectives of this legislation".

The long list of feedstock eligible for advanced biofuels, prepared by the EU Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), includes a number of disputable raw materials which should, this group says, therefore be excluded from the definition because it would once more "open the door to unsustainable biofuels production from food and feed crops".

Looking forward, 2020 marks the deadline for 10% of EU's transport fuels to be sourced from renewable energies. Before then, by 1 July 2014, all new biofuels installations must meet a 60% greenhouse gas saving threshold and, by 1 December 2017, all biofuels installations in operation before 1 July 2014 must meet a greenhouse gas saving threshold of 35% and 50% a year later.

By the end of 2017, the Commission will submit a review of policy and best scientific evidence on ILUC to the European Parliament and Council.

After 2020, the European Commission will not support further subsidies to biofuels unless they can demonstrate "substantial greenhouse gas savings".

British company claims it is making petrol from air

A British company has announced that it is making zero carbon gasoline from air and water using renewable energy.

The announcement was made at the Investing in Future Transport event held on Thursday at City Hall, London, at which a speaker representing the Chinese government also expressed surprise at the lack of British companies seeking Chinese partners.

He said China is offering partnerships and over £1 billion of funding to start-ups in the electric vehicle sector who are researching and developing new batteries and charging technology.

Air Fuel Synthesis was awarded a hypothetical £10.1 million in the Cleantech Investor Future Transport Challenge for a 'Dragon's Den' style pitch by the company's CEO, Peter Harrison. The company, which creates carbon-neutral liquid fuels from renewable energy sources, was one of six participants in the Future Transport Challenge, which took place during the Investing in Future Transport conference, supported by the Mayor of London, in City Hall on 16 August.

The achievements of Air Fuel Synthesis - and the two Future Transport Challenge runners-up, Aeristech (designer of the Full Electric Turbocharger Technology) and EV Innovations (which is building the Bluebird City electric truck) - were acknowledged at an evening reception after the conference, hosted by Norton Rose.

The prizes were presented by Patrick Head, co-founder of Williams Formula 1, who had earlier delivered a keynote address at the conference, focusing on the innovative flywheel automotive energy storage technology developed by Williams Hybrid Systems, which is 78% owned by Williams F1.

The conference, which was organised by Cleantech Investor and Revolve Global and chaired by journalist and television presenter Quentin Willson, combined the Cleantech Investor Future Transport Challenge with sessions on investment opportunities in the transport solutions of the future.

Petrol from air

Peter Harrison, of Teesside-based Air Fuel Synthesis, said that it is now producing carbon-neutral petrol (gasoline) as a practical drop-in synthetic alternative to fossil fuels.

The development is part of the company’s continuing £1.1 million development programme at its demonstrator facility in the North of England where a gasoline fuel reactor is now producing petrol from a methanol base, as a stage towards a commercial fuel production unit, which will be powered by renewable electricity.

The whole process consists of a wind turbine powering an electrolyser that splits water to make hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is combined with carbon dioxide captured from the air to make a hydrocarbon mixture, that can then be developed to make any type of gasoline product.

The company initially proved its fuel reactor technology in April 2012 by producing methanol fuel from carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

Harrison said that the technology “has the potential to become a great British success story, which opens up a crucial opportunity to reduce carbon emissions. It also has the potential to reduce our exposure to an increasingly volatile global energy market. The potential to provide a variety of sustainable fuels for today’s vehicles and infrastructure is especially exciting.

“Further investors and partners will enable us to rapidly commercialise our technologies and help customers address fossil oil price volatility and supply constraints as well as the implications of carbon-driven climate change,“ he said.

The event, which was hosted by ex-Top Gear presenter Quentin Willson, showcased many new types of green transport technology, and included an electric vehicle investor contest which was won by ABB.

This contest recognised the best investor deal in the last 12 months in the sector. Large multinational ABB has acquired start-up company Epyon, which has developed a network of fast-charging direct current electric vehicle charge points and software. It reduces the time taken to charge an electric vehicle to 15 minutes, and enables the charging to be tailored to different starting conditions, power requirements and charge times.

It is significant because ABB offers power and automation services to utility and industry clients that help them improve performance and lower their environmental impact. This represents a fast mainstreaming of the technology in a business context, which will help bring prices down later for consumers.

On display outside City Hall was a mobile hydrogen generation facility. ITM's electrolyser uses about 56kWh of electricity to produce 1kg of hydrogen, which, in a fuel cell driven car, represents the equivalent of around one gallon, or five litres of petrol.

Their unit is mobile and modular, so any number that might be required can be transported to a location where the hydrogen is needed, to produce it on site. The fuel cell vehicles are then filled at the most convenient place for the client, without the need to transport hydrogen around the country.

Several electric vehicles were also available to test drive.

Quentin Willson, who owns two electric cars for his and his wife's everyday use, spoke passionately about electric vehicles. He said that in driving 100,000 miles he has never once run out of power, and reckons that even now there are sufficient charging points around the country to make them viable, in addition to being able to recharge at home.

His Citroën C-Zero costs just £1 to travel 100 miles. “From 2005's Gee Whizz we have come a long way. Electric vehicles can now travel 80 miles on a single charge," he said.

He admitted that at present it does not make financials sense for everybody, and so he has been campaigning for the Government to lift the 20% VAT added to the price of these vehicles for early adopters. “What we do now, determines the final outcome," he said.

ITM's Graham Cooley was in no doubt that hydrogen cars are this future. “With an energy efficiency of 60 to 70% when made from renewable energy, they are a triple zero fuel," he said. "Hydrogen is the answer to storage of intermittent renewable energy," he added.

The biofuels demand

For Dominic Emery, speaking on behalf of BP, it was biofuels that represent the future. BP is investing heavily in traditional corn-ethanol production from sugar cane.

He said that BP's 2030 Outlook shows their view of trends: that from a total global present-day requirement of 85 million barrels of crude oil per day, by 2030, we will need 102-105 million per day. "But oil finds are decreasing," he said.

"From 5% of volume of total fuel used now, biofuels will therefore need to rise to 10% by 2030," he said. “BP has invested several billion in this to date and it will be even more significant in the future. To be successful we need materiality and scalability, which means large continuous tracts of land."

It must be cost-competitive, he said, and the only source that meets this criterion now is Brazilian cane ethanol. It is produced without subsidies at around $60 per barrel, which compares very favourably with oil. The only problem is, it requires industrial scale production across hundreds of thousands of hectares of land.

However, he talked up the need for production to be sustainable not just environmentally but from a social perspective, with a trained and well-supported workforce. “It can do a lot to support rural populations not just in Brazil, but in America as well," he said.

The last word must be left to Ke Gang Wu, of the British China Chamber of Commerce, who made several open calls for British partners to work in China.

He said that China is prioritising electric vehicles over the next decade with central government funding of £1 billion a year. This figure can often be matched by a similar amount from the province where a facility might be located. For example, he said, the second largest manufacturer in Guondong Provice is seeking a partner to develop new batteries.

Several are also looking for partnerships with British start-up companies in electric vehicles and their components.

“I am mystified why more British companies are not coming forward when we will pay the research and development," he said. So were many of those present in the audience.

Why is this sustainable biodiesel illegal in the UK?

The Government is currently considering the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligations (Amendment) Order 2011.


I have seen a copy, and I can tell you that there is plenty to be concerned about in terms of its inadequacy.

But in this column I'm going to concentrate on one particular aspect: an appalling oversight which involves a potentially valuable renewable resource going unused in huge quantities, while existing biodiesel is not as sustainable as it seems.

Up against the law

John Nicholson runs an international business turning waste products, including some from the paper industry and used vegetable oil, into diesel fuels which can be burnt both in generators to produce heat and power, and in diesel vehicles. He also deals in fuel line heat exchangers and related technology.

Recently, he was raided by representatives of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs who confiscated thousands of pounds worth of fuel, without compensation, and issued him with a tax bill for the fuel at the highest rate. It's a wonder he is still in business.

As part of the biopower network, his experience is not unique, but if you talk to anyone else in the mainstream biodiesel or biofuel network, say in the National Centre for Biorenewable Energy, Fuels and Materials, in DECC, or in the Department for Transport, they are completely unaware that this sort of thing goes on.

Now, you and I know that it is both common sense and environmentally sound to reduce both carbon emissions and waste by collecting used vegetable oils and chemically related liquids from cafes and other outlets and reusing it as biodiesel.

So why is it that what John Nicholson and those in his network do, is currently illegal in this country?

Current legislation requires that any conventional biodiesel:

1. must contain biomass or waste cooking oil
2. must not contain hydrocarbons
3. must have a total ester content not less than 96.5% by weight
4. and a sulphur content not exceeding 0.005% by weight.

It is the third point which John fell foul of.

Yet there is nothing about the chemistry of esters that makes them uniquely suited for the manufacture of biofuels.

There is, in fact, a wide range of non-fossil derived materials (much of which is currently regarded as waste) that could most beneficially be used to make biofuels, but at present these materials cannot be used in the UK because they are not esters.

In Ethiopia, China, Germany, Croatia, Italy, Spain, and many other nations these materials can be used without obstruction.

The EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED), (amendments to which are currently out to consultation), which is the 'parent’ of the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation and other UK legislation specifying the use of biodiesel, makes no restriction on the proportion of esters which can be used in biodiesel.

The current draft defines it as "methyl-ester produced from vegetable or animal oil, of diesel quality, to be used as biofuel", without specifying any proportion.

Why is Britain adopting this unsustainable position?

John has a sneaky feeling, which he cannot prove, that it is because of pressure from the UK petrochemical industry, which uses a petrochemical byproduct to make legal biodiesel.

In the UK, the only currently legal biodiesels involve in their manufacture the chemical process of transesterification, by which biodiesels are manufactured as a Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME), using these byproducts (and others, such as rape seed oil, which uses agricultural land).

This is an inefficient process, causing the production of waste glycerol.

By comparison, a more sustainable process is available, which does not create waste.

Instead, it recycles a waste, used vegetable oil, and creates a larger volume of fuel from the source material than is provided by transesterification.

Britain produces more used cooking oil waste than any other EU nation. Yet most of this is collected and then sold to the biofuels makers in France, Germany and Austria because they can afford to pay better prices for our UCO, because they have lower biofuel taxes.

Many sustainable biofuel resources are available but are currently discarded as waste, such as terpentine from the pulp and paper making industry, and terpenes (non-esters) from the essential oils of many types of plants and flowers.

Unless reused, such materials will otherwise biodegrade to form methane, a greenhouse gas far more damaging than carbon dioxide.

Although these materials can be refined and used for many applications, low grade material can be used in dilution with vegetable oil to make a biofuel that can be run in most vehicles at 100%.

It is a simple mixing process, in which used cooking oil is blended with a solvent. The solvent can be made from these essential oils, alcohol and water.

This lowers the viscosity of the fuel slightly, and raises its cetane value (an indicator of its ease of combustion). Further additives can also improve the power-to-heat output from engines, thereby improving tractive performance.

This wide range of non-fossil derived materials, that could be used in the manufacture of better biofuels, is not available in the UK because of the barrier created by the ester content requirement, and the unhelpful position being taken by HMRC on this issue that led to John Nicholson's stock being confiscated and destroyed.

The non-renewable renewable fuel

There is a further problem with conventional and legal biodiesel: it can contain fossil fuels.

Surprised? This is because methanol is required to make traditional biodiesel as a Fatty Acid Methyl Ester, by the chemical process of transesterification with methanol, using caustic soda as a catalyst.

Commercially available methanol is made from the methane that exudes from oil and gas wells, and is a waste by-product from the petrochemical industry.

It therefore contains fossil derived carbon atoms, and burning methanol or a methyl ester continues to exacerbate climate change, turning what is supposed to be a renewable fuel into one that is less so.

The further incomprehensible and inconsistent fact is that while biofuels are taxed, methanol made from methane is not!

Taxing methanol, and removing the ester condition from biodiesel, would therefore help the UK to meet the Fuel Quality Directive, which requires suppliers to reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuels.

In fact, from the sustainability angle, the whole format of the legal provision in the Hydrocarbon Oil Duties Act 1979 (HODA) is now so complicated and ambiguous that it is totally unfit for purpose.

HMRC is now interpreting this law in such a way that is putting many people off setting up biofuel projects that could operate as community businesses collecting local waste cooking oil and encouraging local farmers to grow energy crops which can be processed to make fuel to meet local needs.

My request to the Department for Transport

So, in summary, here are four things that need to be changed to make biofuels more sustainable in the UK:

1. remove the criteria applied to biodiesel that it must be not less than 96.5% ester content by weight
2. increase the present tax break on biofuel to at least 60p per litre, or remove tax completely
3. remove tax from any biofuel used to produce electricity, or for off road purposes
4. remove biofuels from the scope of the Tied Oils Act under HODA. HMRC claim that any non-fossil derived plant oil is subject to the Tied Oils Act, even though the act itself refers to mineral oil. This creates an ambiguous situation that is open to interpretation.

I have talked to people in WRAP, which I would have thought would be interested in the resource efficiency aspect of reusing used vegetable oil. They have not considered it, and it is not in their work programme.

I have talked to people in the Environment Agency, and while they are interested in the waste aspect, though not concerned with the taxation issue.

HMRC says it is a matter for government to decide.

Whenever John Nicholson has written to the Treasury or DECC, he has received no answer.

The new Renewable Transport Fuel Obligations (Amendment) Order 2011 makes no mention of this problem.

The Renewable Energy Association, which represents the biofuel and energy from waste lobby, does not comment on this specific issue, but does say that the new RTFO "gives no encouragement for the supply of biofuels that do more than reach the minimum sustainability requirements of the RED" and gives "no incentive to produce 'better' biofuels ( i.e. those that deliver high GHG savings)".

The UK Carbon Plan is to increase biofuel use to 5% by energy to 2015 followed by further biofuels contribution to 2020 renewable targets with an assessment of road biofuel potential up to then and a decision taken on biofuel use by 2020.

The RED renewable transport target is 10% by 2020. But the RTFO specifies no route to achieve this.

If the Government seeks to meet this target, it really ought to urgently attend to this problem, and make it possible to produce more sustainable biodiesel without breaking the law.