Indirect effects of biofuels

Through assurance schemes it is relatively easy to gauge the impact that feedstocks have. For example, with a crop based feedstock grown locally, it is possible to physical audit the farm providing a high degree of certainty over the auditing process. The resulting biofuel may therefore be assigned greenhouse gas and sustainability values with a high degree of certainty. However the theory of indirect effects says that even if you have a fuel which has been produced in a sustainable way it may still have unforeseen negative consequences.

In our example of a well managed crop feedstock, if that crop replaces a food crop in the UK it may result in a food crop being planted in an area of high environmental value somewhere else in the World. This is due to the interlinked nature of the World commodity markets.

Any system that addresses indirect effects will have to accurately take account of these markets forces. This is very difficult to do and will take time. In the meantime there are feedstocks such as waste streams that will not fall foul of indirect effects. In addition any crop based feedstocks that can be shown not to result in a loss of food crop or other currently produced crops will also be free from indirect effects. For the remaining crops it isn’t possible to guarantee that they will not contribute at this point in time. Equally it is impossible to say that they definitely will.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the biofuels industry doesn’t want to be treated as a special case. The hope is that the assurance schemes developed for biofuels will be applied more widely so that the work that is being done to ensure that biofuels are produced sustainably may ultimately lead to other sectors adopting the same principles.