Sustainable Biofuels the only Solution

For a description of what biofuels are, how they are produced, consumed, and issues of quality, please read this Factsheet produced by EECA

Background

Biofuels will provide one solution to the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change - they can only provide a partial solution due to environmental and social constraints. New Zealand will still need to seek to be more efficient with fuel use, and reduce our constantly growing demand.

Sustainable Biofuel

The sustainability of biofuel can be measured on many grounds. The Green Party believes that biofuel should be assessed against these criteria before being acceptable for use

1. Biofuel sources can displace indigenous forest and threaten biodiversity. There are many examples internationally where rainforest has been felled to make way for biofuel crops. This is unacceptable.
   
2. Biofuel crops can displace food crops. First-generation biofuel sources such as corn for ethanol have had this effect, and many price rises in staple foods such as corn and wheat can be traced to pressure on cropland from biofuel. Second-generation biofuel sources such as wood waste are more sustainable in this regard.
   
3. Biofuels must have a positive Energy Balance. This means they must produce more energy value than that used to create them. A complete life-cycle assessment is needed to properly calculate this. While market should make a lack of energy gain uneconomic, government subsidies can distort this.
   
4. Biofuels must have a significant net greenhouse gas emission reduction. The emissions produced to create the fuel, from sources such as fertiliser, intensive soil disturbance, land use change, energy use, and transport of the fuel, could potentially outweigh that saved in the biofuel displacing fossil fuel.
   
5. Various other environmental and social impacts could result from biofuel production, such as local pollution, the multiple impacts of large-scale agri-fuel farming, the negative effects of land use and landscape change, the loss of general biodiversity habitat, the exploitation of workers,
   

Biofuels in NZ

The Government has presented a Biofuel Bill to require an increasing component of our transport fuel is from bio-sources. The Green Party is concerned that biofuels can also become environmentally and socially unsustainable, and already are in many situations, and will seek ways to ensure New Zealand only produces and imports sustainable biofuel.

There are international precedents, including in the EU and the Netherlands. Significantly, a Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) initiative of the Swiss EPFL Energy Center is a key multi-stakeholder initiative to develop standards for the sustainability of biofuels. By mid 2008, it aims to have draft standards developed for sustainable biofuels.
www.bioenergywiki.net/Roundtable_on_Sustainable_Biofuels

Indeed, New Zealand could take a role in promoting sustainable biofuel sources through assistance to developing countries and to domestic local economic development, through promotion of second generation biofuels over fuel sources that displace food production, and by promoting best practice production standards.