The year 2026 appears to be particularly significant for the biofuel industry and the equipment required to make it function, as hugely ambitious plans intend to make it a critical part of the future of sustainable industry and transportation.
At the centre of this is the Belem 4X Pledge, discussed as part of a wider package of measures at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30.
This pledge would quadruple the production of sustainable fuels, including biofuels, by the year 2035.
At the same time, there has been a call from car manufacturers, particularly those that sell cars in the European Union, to allow for cars which use internal combustion engines to continue to be sold on the condition that they meet the European Commission’s carbon-neutral requirements.
This has sparked concerns about the complex implications of such a reversal on the supply chain of biofuels and whether it is the optimal use of resources.
Will the EU change their rules? What are the positive and negative effects? And what are the long-term implications of either decision?
What Is The So-Called Biofuel Loophole?
In a bid to rapidly reduce carbon emissions, many governments have enacted policies that aim to reduce the number of polluting cars on the road.
Many governments, including the United Kingdom and the European Union, plan to ban or heavily restrict the sale of new cars which use petrol or diesel due to the cumulative levels of pollution caused by exhaust fumes.
In the UK, this takes the form of a ban on new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and a requirement for all new cars to emit zero emissions by 2035.
In the EU, the rules are similar but go further by banning not only conventional petrol and diesel cars but also hybrid and plug-in hybrid ones, which critics have claimed can be zero-emission vehicles if they use sustainable fuel and are efficient enough.
This “biofuel loophole”, which has been advocated by car manufacturers, the Italian government, and German politicians, according to Bloomberg, would be to continue to allow conventional cars using sustainable fuels as long as they are zero-emission vehicles.
What Would Be The Positives Of Allowing A Biofuel Loophole?
The biggest advantages would be to support the European car industry and biofuel producers during what has been an incredibly difficult period for the car industry as a whole.
A multipartite array of issues, including brutal tariff policies employed by the United States, difficulties implementing a European manufacturing hub for electric batteries and intense competition caused by China’s EV head start, has put several major manufacturers in difficult positions.
It is also somewhat easier to make the transition from increasingly efficient petrol cars using ever-larger biofuel blends than it is to switch to an electric vehicle and thus have to develop an entirely new infrastructure around it.
Focusing on biofuel encourages its production, which lowers its cost for shipping and aviation as well as car transportation, whilst not only reducing fossil fuels but also dependence on oil imports.
Changing the rules to require entirely sustainable zero-emissions fuels also encourages funding into a shift away from crop-based biofuels towards fuels that use waste oil, algae and other advanced electrofuels.
What Are The Potential Consequences Of Changing The Policy?
However, Transport and Environment have noted several serious potential implications of radically changing the sustainability policy to deemphasise fully electric cars.
Chief amongst these is that demand for biofuels would skyrocket, potentially bringing the total required amount of fuel to up to nine times the amount that can be sourced through zero emissions means by 2050.
Part of the issue with this is that waste fats are more limited, and there have been historic issues with fraudulent reporting.
According to T&E, a car using fuel derived from animal fats would require around 120 pigs per year, whilst a car running on cooking oil would need the waste oil that comes from 25kg of chips each day.
Because the EU simply does not produce enough waste oil, it needs to be imported from elsewhere, but a massive concern exposed by the BBC was that some virgin oil supplies were relabeled and used to produce supposedly sustainable fuels.
Not only is this fraud and therefore completely illegal, but using virgin oil to produce biofuels offsets the environmental benefits of biofuels.
Fraudulent activity aside, the environmental costs of transportation inherently eat into its potential to be a zero-emissions sustainable fuel, whilst it argues that if the same land used for biofuel crops was used for a solar farm, it could produce the same amount of energy in far less space and power far more cars.
