Industrial bioenergy: A dangerous false solution to climate change

Most people will associate renewable energy targets with wind turbines and solar panels – yet at least in the EU and US, a power station smokestack might be a more representative image. Burning biomass and waste accounts for two-thirds of what is classified as renewable energy across the EU.[1] In the US, bioenergy accounts for over 49% of “renewable energy”, compared to figures of 17% for wind and 4% for solar power – hydro dams account for most of the remainder.[2]

Bioenergy includes liquid biofuels such as biodiesel made mainly from rapeseed oil, soya and palm oil, and ethanol made from sugar or grains. Biofuels are mainly used in cars and other vehicles but in some countries (e.g. Italy) they are also burned in power stations and combined heat and power plants. The most bioenergy, by far, comes from burning wood. Fuelled by subsidies, there has been a major surge in woodstoves and boilers across Europe and North America. In addition, many new power stations are being designed for burning wood as well as smaller amounts of other biomass such as straw.

The biggest wood-burners, however, are coal power stations: In the UK, the largest coal power station, Drax, is on track to burn pellets from 14 million tonnes of wood every year. That is 27% more wood than the UK produces annually.[3] Drax already burns more wood than any other power plant in the world (whilst still burning more coal than any other UK power stations) and coal power station operators elsewhere are also burning or looking to burn vast quantities of wood.

Globally, the picture is a bit more complicated: Most non-fossil fuel, non-nuclear energy worldwide comes from burning biomass, especially wood, but most of that is classified as “traditional” rather than “modern” biomass. International agencies and the large public-private partnership “Sustainable Energy for All” increasingly classify all traditional biomass as unsustainable and non-renewable. This would include wood or dung used by women to cook meals – unless they are using a “modern” stove. A UN’s General Assembly resolution backing the Sustainable Energy for All, identified just one single energy source as being of concern, traditional biomass for cooking and heating.[4] Yet this initiative’s flawed logic does not even exclude coal from being supported under its remit. When it comes to “modern renewable energy”, bioenergy is still surpassed by hydropower worldwide. As International Rivers Network and many others have long shown, the impacts of large hydro-dams on communities and ecosystems can be devastating and their greenhouse gas emissions (mainly methane) can be as great as those of coal power stations.[5] But “modern” or industrial bioenergy – following the examples of the EU and US – is increasingly being promoted and expanded across the world.

The often devastating impacts of biofuels are widely known. Well over 30 million hectares of land worldwide are now under crop and tree monocultures plantations in order to produce feedstock biofuels.[6] Some of this land had previously supported highly biodiverse ecosystems – such as rainforests on peatlands in Indonesia and Malaysia (home to Indigenous and other forest-dependent Peoples) or remnants of diverse prairie grasslands in the US. Some of it has been grabbed from small farmers, pastoralists and other communities. And in many cases, vegetable oil, sugar and grains have simply been diverted from food and animal feed markets. Among the direct impacts are increased pesticide use and poisoning, freshwater pollution and depletion, larger and new ocean “dead zones” due to agrotoxic runoffs from fields, biodiversity loss and increased soil erosion.

The impacts of biofuels, however, are felt far beyond those 30+ million hectares of land: First, there are real problems with what is widely referred to as “Indirect Land Use Change”. This is an area of land that previously produced food, such as grains or vegetables, and is converted into a biofuel production area. As a result, prices go up and somewhere else forests will be cut down or other ecosystems will be ploughed up to “replace” the food or feed. Further, biofuels linked to the destruction of forests and other ecosystems – whether directly or indirectly – are generally worse for the climate than equivalent amounts of fossil fuels, at least when considered for a period of a few decades.

A second major problem is that land speculation is aided by the expectation of ever growing biofuel use. According to ActionAid, European investors had acquired 6 million hectares of land in sub-Saharan Africa for biofuels by May 2013.[7] Yet actual biofuel production in or biofuel feedstock exports from Africa remains miniscule. The “promise” of biofuel profits, it appears, has been widely used to attract investment in land grabs for quite different – often purely speculative – purposes. But many of those biofuel schemes may be fictitious, those land grabs, undertaken under the guise of “biofuels projects”, are all too real, causing large-scale displacement and evictions of communities, loss of food sovereignty, more hunger and malnutrition and water grabbing. And finally, growing demand for biofuels has combined with speculation in food and other “agricultural commodities” to cause major volatility in food prices, such as the global food price spikes of 2008 and 2012.

Virtually all of those devastating impacts can be traced back to biofuel subsidies, including quotas, mandates and tax reductions, i.e. to artificial markets. The region most responsible for the global trade in biofuels is the EU with its 10% “renewable energy for transport” aka (mainly) biofuel target by 2020. Yet despite the major global impacts of biofuels, their contribution to global transport fuel remains a tiny 2-3%.[8]

Some ten years after the start of those disastrous biofuel policies, the EU and North America seem intent to repeating the experience with wood-based bioenergy (biomass). Energy companies and wood pellet producers are rapidly creating a new global market in wood pellets, while the global (or more often regional) woodchip trade is “diversifying” to serve bioenergy markets including traditional pulp and paper and wood panel markets.

The impacts of industrial wood-based bioenergy are very similar as those of liquid biofuels and both are largely artificial markets – i.e. markets created and propped up by direct and indirect subsidies. However, there are two important differences:

Firstly, energy companies and their suppliers (e.g. wood pellet manufacturers) are sourcing wood directly from logging natural forests as well as from industrial tree plantations. In fact, cutting down slow-growing hardwood trees makes for higher-quality wood pellets which are favoured by many energy companies compared to pellets made from fast-growing tree plantations or sawmill residues. Coal power stations in particular tend to rely on the highest quality pellets. This is why, in the southern US, remnants of highly bottomland hardwood forests – amongst the most biodiverse temperate ecosystems in the world – are now being clearfelled to make wood pellets for export to the EU (especially to Drax in the UK).[9]

Secondly, unlike the global trade in biofuels, the trade in wood-based bioenergy is currently almost entirely a North-to-North trade and there are few signs of this changing in the near future. The only exception is a much smaller intra-Asian trade, with South Korea importing pellets from Southeast Asian countries, especially Vietnam. The world’s main pellets exporters are the southern US and Canada and they are currently able to outcompete any other pellet exporting regions due to cheap domestic energy (turning wood into pellets requires a lot of energy) and lax or absent logging regulations. Therefore, the impacts of biomass policies in the North on countries of the Global South are at present almost entirely indirect ones – which does not make them any less serious. And just as EU biofuels policies have been used by speculative investors to legitimise and finance land-grabs in sub-Saharan Africa, hype about EU biomass policies is already being exploited by companies to advance their land-grabbing in Africa.[10]

Biofuel and now industrial wood-based biomass policies and investments result from a convergence of different interests – interests of energy companies, agribusiness, logging and tree plantation firms, speculative land grabbers and others. They rely on policy choices made by different governments. However, UNFCCC agreements and mechanisms have boosted such bad choices:

Firstly, under member states’ UNFCCC reporting requirements, all stack or tailpipe emissions associated with bioenergy are ignored. Biomass power stations, for example, emit up to 50% more CO2 per unit of energy than coal power stations from their smokestacks, but governments report them as zero carbon emitters. Emissions are supposed to be reported as part of countries’ LULUCF (land use, land use change and forestry) emissions, though accounting rules for that sector have been heavily criticised by civil society groups. But even if they were improved, we would still be left with a situation where the EU can for example claim “carbon savings” from burning more palm oil biofuels in cars whilst the blame for the vast emissions from deforestation for producing that palm oil is placed entirely on countries such as Indonesia. And secondly, biomass and biofuel projects in Southern countries have been approved under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – while the EU treats all bioenergy as “carbon neutral” in the EU Emissions Trading System.

As long as industrial bioenergy remains included in the definition of renewable energy in the EU and elsewhere, higher renewable energy targets will, perversely, translate into more land grabbing, more forest destruction, more biodiversity loss and even more greenhouse gas emissions. And within overall renewable targets, biofuels and wood pellets will continue to compete, not with fossil fuels, but with wind and solar power (which have a much lower carbon and land footprint). The same is true for the false definition of large hydro dams as renewable energy. As long as the definition of renewable energy remains as flawed as it is now, climate justice activists need to avoid blanket calls for “more renewables”. There is a need for solidarity amongst campaigners and social movements against different forms of destructive energy and with communities whether they are affected by coal mines, fracking, polluting biomass plants and waste incinerators or land-grabbing and forest destruction for bioenergy.

END NOTES

[1] Eurostat
[2] US Energy Information Administration
[3] http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/axedrax-campaign/
[4] See report
[5] http://www.internationalrivers.org/
[6] See report but note that this dates from 2007 - since then, EU and global biofuel use has increased very substantially
[7] Adding fuel to the flame
[8] http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/biofuels_roadmap_web.pdf
[9] See www.dogwoodalliance.org
[10] http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2014/biomass-landgrabbing-report/

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