>From : International Herald Tribune Published: January 14, 2008 *PARIS <http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/14/business/biofuels.php#>:* In a sign of shifting attitudes toward biofuels, European Union officials are proposing to ban imports of certain fuel crops whose production could do more harm than good in fighting climate change, according to a draft law seen Monday.
The proposals, to be unveiled next week, are aimed at enhancing the environmental credentials of biofuels like biodiesel or ethanol to counter concerns that European drivers are playing a role in destroying wetlands, forests and grasslands in areas like Southeast Asia or Latin America each time they fill up their tanks. In its draft, the EU requires that biofuels from crops grown on some kinds of land covered in forest, wetlands and grasslands as of January 2008 should be banned for use in the 27-nation bloc. The commission also would require that biofuels used in Europe should deliver "a minimum level of greenhouse gas savings." The text, which could change before European commissioners meet Jan. 23 to adopt a final version, also emphasizes that areas like rainforests and lands with high levels of biodiversity should not be converted to growing biofuels. At the same time, the EU does not want to abandon biofuels because of the contribution they could still make to increasing Europe's energy independence. "The problem is that we have no alternative to oil at the moment, and 90 percent of our transport in Europe depends on oil, making us extremely vulnerable to foreign supplies," said Ferran Tarradellas Espuny, the spokesman for the EU energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs. Europe is drafting its rules on biofuels amid rising prices for gasoline and diesel and growing worries about climate change across the world. In recent years, a number of countries have started growing and using fuels produced from plants or agricultural waste. In the United States, ethanol produced from corn has boomed, as has sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil. In Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States, vegetable oils have been converted into a type of diesel fuel by a simple chemical procedure. In principle, these biofuels promise not only to displace imported oil but also to lower the amount of greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere. The crops absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow, and the fuels made from them re-emit that same gas when they are burned a few months later. But it is turning out that fuel crops hold the potential for considerable environmental harm. Not only is native vegetation, including tropical rain forest, being chopped down in some cases to plant the crops, but the crops also are often grown using fossil fuels like diesel for tractors - and they demand nitrogen fertilizer made largely with natural gas. Moreover, turning the crops into fuels can demand huge amounts of water. Experts say certain types of fuels, particularly those made from agricultural wastes, still hold potential to improve the environment. But it is only now becoming clear that to achieve that goal, governments will have to set and enforce standards for how the fuels are produced. With its new proposal, Europe appears to be moving ahead of the rest of the world in that task. In part that is because biofuels - a blanket term covering fuels grown from crops to manufacture substitutes for diesel and gasoline - are the main weapon foreseen by the EU to lower emissions from the transport sector, which has the fastest growing levels of greenhouse gases among all sectors of its economy. The increasingly negative image of biofuels has left officials pulled in separate directions - on the one hand trying to clean up the market for biofuels that cause environmental damage while, on the other hand, seeking to rehabilitate biofuels to meet ambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets that have made Europe a world leader in tackling climate change. The draft EU rules probably would have the biggest effect on growers of palm oil in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, according to Matt Drinkwater, a biofuels analyst with New Energy Finance in London. "Some proposed developments in Southeast Asia will almost certainly be blocked by these provisions," he said, explaining that the rules would make it much harder to plant on recently cleared land or export fuels to Europe that emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases produced during the process of manufacturing biodiesel from palm oil. Growers of crops to produce ethanol - a substitute for gasoline that is more commonly used in the United States than in Europe - also could be affected because the EU rules contain previsions on preserving grasslands, said Drinkwater. Crops for ethanol are grown widely in parts of South America, including Brazil.
