European Parliament may reject 10 percent mandate, ban use of arable land as key legislator announces biofuels opposition

The European Parliament may reject the 10 percent biofuels mandate proposed by the leaders of the 27 EU member states. The Parliament is required to approve the mandate in committee in July and in final legislation in September. A leader of energy legislation in the Parliament, Claude Turmes of Luxembourg, a member of the Green Party, has called for a ban on the use of arable land for biofuels and for the rejection of the mandate.

The EU is facing a stalemate over implementation of biofuels sustainability standards. The European Parliament wants sustainability criteria to be included in the EU Fuel Quality Directive, while the European Commission said that the criteria is already included in the January 23rd directive on renewables, which instructed that 10% of all transport fuel consumption in the EU be sourced from biofuels by 2020. The EU has agreed that biofuels must deliver a life-cycle CO2 savings of 35 percent to count towards the 10 percent target.

Members of the European Parliament in Brussels recently approved the emissions reduction plan proposed by the European Commission. The package of proposals included proposals on emission cuts, renewable sources, carbon capture and revision of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, with a stated goal of reducing EU greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent and increasing the share of renewable energies in the energy consumption by 2020 to 20 percent.

New EU laws are expected to ban the importation of biofuels grown in forests, grassland or wetlands, and is expected to affect palm oil based imports due to deforestation, South American ethanol and biodiesel with grassland or forest land use issues, and US corn ethanol due to lower emissions savings.

The European Union introduced measures last week to establish punitive tariffs on US biofuel imports and require a 35 percent carbon emission reduction from any feedstock allowed to be used in biofuel production. Canola oil, which is Europe’s feedstock of choice, has a 37 percent emission savings. It is expected that the EU will ban palm oil made on plantations established after 2003.

Last week, a consortium of 17 non-governmental organizations called on EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs to require sustainability standards for biofuel production or eliminate biofuels mandates.

The NGOs were responding to a draft biofuels mandate for the EU which will be finalized later this month and raises the use of biofuels to 10 percent of all fuels by 2020. The NGOs said that the plan did not fully address water shortage and deforestation issues. The NGOs called for a ban on the use of sugar cane, corn, and some varieties of canola and palm oils in biofuels production. The NGOs proposed threshold, that only feedstocks producing a minimum savings of 50 percent in CO2, has won significant support in the European Parliament.

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