The European Union (EU) has, in fact, been engaged in a virtual race against time to meet its aggressive biofuels ambitions. It’s been nearly three years since the EU—15 member states strong at the time—adopted its Biofuels Directive, a broad and somewhat toothless policy that laid the groundwork for increasing the production and use of biodiesel, ethanol and other renewable transportation fuels. Despite its ambiguity, the Biofuels Directive was a landmark piece of biofuels legislation, and a pseudo-stride toward requiring the use of biodiesel and ethanol blends throughout the EU. The directive essentially instructed the member countries to ensure that a minimum of 2 percent of all gasoline and diesel be replaced with biofuels by the end of 2005—which did not happen—and 5.75 percent by 2010. Truth be told, progress has been slow, and just two countries met the 2005 deadline: Germany, using mainly biodiesel, and Sweden, using mainly ethanol.
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The target was utterly missed, officials said, because the directive was just that—a directive—and not regulatory. In fact, biofuels accounted for just 0.8 percent of all of the EU’s transportation fuels at the end of last year. For that reason and others, the European Commission (EC) decided to take serious action. After all, officials asked, if the EU was 60 percent behind its target in 2005, how would it possibly get back on track within a half-decade without a bold new roadmap?
Enter the Biomass Action Plan.
Introduced in late 2005, the Biomass Action Plan established 20 actions that were implemented at the start of 2006. It is designed to increase the use of energy from forestry, agriculture and waste materials. In particular, the EC focused on removing administrative and grid barriers for green electricity and biofuels. The EC was also motivated by the fossil fuels market. “The measures in favor of transport biofuels, in particular, are a practical response to the problem of high oil prices,” Andris Piebalgs, the EC’s energy commissioner, said at the time of the plan’s unveiling.
This time around, however, the EC wasn’t letting member states use ambiguity—a lack of details or direction—as an excuse for missing future goals. So in early February it unveiled what it calls the EU Strategy for Biofuels, a sort of supplement to the Biomass Action Plan. The strategy is both more definite and, interestingly, more global in reach than previous communications and directives from the EC. Its three principal goals are: 1) promote biofuels in both the EU and developing countries; 2) prepare for large-scale use of biofuels by improving their cost-competitiveness and increasing research into so-called “second-generation” fuels; and 3) support developing countries where biofuels production could stimulate sustainable economic growth. Seven objectives of the policy attempt to answer how the EU will meet these goals (see The seven objectives of EU Biofuels Strategy goals).
The strength of the strategy is its “cross-cutting approach” to biofuels demand and supply, says Michael Mann, spokesman for the EC’s Agriculture and Rural Development branch. “The [strategy] brings together all the different facets of the discussion—environmental, agricultural, trade, development, industrial, employment, taxation and competition policies, as well as the key need for further research,” Mann says. “It was not easy to find the right balance between these issues, but I think we managed it.”
Politically, the strategy is opening up discussion for the EC to reevaluate the growingly outdated Biofuels Directive—and officials are talking about doing it this year. Though more member countries than not have created biofuels policies, some officials believe EU-wide mandates are necessary to enforce the use of ethanol and biodiesel. The proposed year-end evaluation could result in biofuels mandates. “Overall, one could say that this strategy has put biofuels on the political agenda [more effectively] than ever before,” says Rob Vierhout, secretary general of the European Bioethanol Fuel Association (eBIO). “The effectiveness of selected measures will eventually depend on whether law will be proposed and adopted.”
Born out of environmental, social policy
The EU Strategy for Biofuels follows a series of increasingly ambitious directives and EC communications focused on environmental protection and climate change largely consistent with the objectives of the Kyoto Protocol. The EU officially ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002. The United States did not sign on to Kyoto, but those that did—there are about 40 participating industrialized countries—have agreed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide from factories, power plants and vehicles by 8 percent (compared to 1990 levels) by 2012. With that deadline approaching, the EU found it necessary to target transportation, as opposed to industry, as the most viable sector of immediate emissions reductions. Diesel- and gasoline-powered vehicles are the source of an estimated 21 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, the type widely linked to global warming.
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