Industry News
LMC casts doubt on resources for biofuels targets
9th October 2007
David Jackson, an analyst at LMC International Ltd in London, has calculated that the world would need an additional 100 million hectares of farmland if all countries were to blend 5% of biofuels into road fuels - as many envisage, by 2015. The required land, about half the size of Indonesia, would match roughly the total additional land available for farming on earth, including remote areas of Africa or Brazil. "There's no perfect solution for ethanol or biodiesel from food crops, or from agriculture," Jackson told Reuters in a news report yesterday.
Reuters also reported Frank Gunstone, honorary professor at Scottish Crop Research Institute, saying the world would need an additional 10 million tonnes of vegetable oils a year to meet demand from both the food and fuel sectors, but the last crop year’s increase, to 153m tonnes was 9 million tonnes at best, and the shortfall is already raising prices.
D1 Oils plc, the UK-based biodiesel refiner, is planting 175,000 hectares of Jatropha, a toxic non-food oil-bearing plant,on non-agricultural land in Africa, but says it has yet to be developed into a fully commercial fuel feedstock crop.
Yesterday, European Commission officials are reported by Reuters to be likely to reduce the current €45 per hectare subsidy, introduced in 2004, available to EU growers of biofuels crops including sugar beet, cereals and vegetable oil plants such as rapeseed. The premium was intended to be reduced as the area devoted to biofuels crops expanded beyond 2m hectares, and may fall to €30 per hectare as the crop area approaches 3m hectares.