Less than a third of the biofuel used in UK road fuels meets the Government’s own environmental standards, according to the latest report from the soon-to-be-abolished Renewable Fuels Agency.
The findings were published in a report to Parliament last Tuesday (25 January 2011) by the agency which is responsible for assessing the impacts of biofuel supplied through the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO)-a job which the Department for Transport (DfT) is set to take over.
Just 31 per cent of biofuel supplied to the UK transport sector was found to have met the qualifying criteria, well below the target of 50 per cent. The majority of suppliers also missed the greenhouse gas target of 50 per cent, but the RTFO as a whole was found to have achieved a 51 per cent savings compared to fossil fuels. However, these figures do not include carbon emissions from indirect changes in land use.
The agency, one of those facing the axe in a government cull of quangos, revealed that many of the major oil companies are missing sustainability performance targets including BP, Chevron, Murco, Total, INEOS and Morgan. Murco failed to report any fuel meeting the RTFO’s Environmental Qualifying Standard and Prax failed to have its sustainability data verified. However at the other end of the scale, Greenergy, Lissan, Mabanaft and Topaz all met the targets.
The RTFO sets out a requirement for all petrol and diesel sold in the UK to include a percentage of biofuel, it also sets environmental standards, designed to ensure the use of biofuel doesn’t lead to deforestation or rising carbon emissions. In the year 2009/2010, all road fuels sold in the UK needed to contain at least 3.3 per cent biofuel.
Most of the biofuel supplied to the UK transport sector is imported, biodiesel from soy was the single biggest source (31 per cent) in 2009/10, much of it comes from South America. Environmentalists are concerned that the use of biofuel could encourage the destruction of natural habitats, actually increasing GHG emissions and conflicting with global food supplies.
The RFA’s CEO Nick Goodall said: “We’ve seen some progress from suppliers in meeting the challenge of sourcing their biofuels responsibly, but in many cases it has been disappointingly slow. Too many are lagging behind and dragging overall performance down. With mandatory sustainability criteria due to be introduced with the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), companies currently missing all three targets need to make a step change in performance.”
The implementation of the RED across the EU from December 2010 is designed to ensure that biofuels are guaranteed not to have been grown on recently deforested or highly biodiverse land.
