British scientists question biofuel benefits

The Royal Society has today voiced its criticism of the booming biofuels industry.

In a report entitled Sustainable Biofuels: prospects and challenges, the influential scientific academy warned that biofuels could prove environmentally damaging and argued that they would not provide an instant solution for tackling transport-related carbon emissions.

The report also cautions that the UK's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), which requires that five per cent of UK fuels sold by 2010 are from renewable sources, does not include a target for cutting carbon emissions and as a result may not encourage use of those biofuels that deliver the greatest carbon savings.

"Biofuels could play an important role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions from transport here and globally," said Professor John Pickett, who chaired the Royal Society study. "[But] in designing policies and incentives to encourage investment in and the use of biofuels, it is important to remember that one is not the same as another."

To tackle this problem, the report recommends that the government includes a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target in the RTFO and expands plans to introduce a means of certifying different biofuels as environmentally and economically sustainable.

"We must not create new environmental or social problems in our efforts to deal with climate change," said Pickett. "Indeed, while the RTFO is a reasonable start, unless certification is applied to the production of all biofuels and is a system used by all countries we will merely displace rather than remedy the potentially negative effects of these fuels."

The Royal Society report comes on the same day as the EU revealed it is to re-examine its target for sourcing 10 per cent of its road fuels from biofuels by 2020 after admitting that it may have underestimated the adverse environmental and social impacts.

In an interview with the BBC, European Commission environment minister Stavros Dimas confirmed that there was a need to reconsider Europe's biofuel policy. "We have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels are bigger than we thought they were," he said, adding that the Commission would have to introduce sustainability criteria to ensure the promised environmental benefits of biofuels are realised