European Parliament’s main parties agree amendment on biofuels curbs

The European Parliament’s main political parties have proposed to cap the use of crop-based biofuels from 2021 to the levels consumed by individual member states in 2017, with thresholds in most major EU member states likely to be well below the 7% limit agreed by the EU Council in December.

Ahead of a plenary vote in the European Parliament on 17 January, the European People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) agreed a compromise amendment that provides for the use of crop-based biofuels after 2021.

They have also agreed to find a way of preventing imports of palm oil for use in renewable transport.

Staff working for MEPs said the amendment seeks to cap usage at a constant 2017 level from 2021 through 2030.

Data for biofuels use in individual member states in 2017 might not become available until later this year in some countries, while for other nations the figures might not appear until 2019.

An industry source said it would be a long time before such benchmarks could be calculated.

“The compromise was put together very quickly so the amendment lacks detail. For instance, what kind of data would be used to calculate the 2017 benchmarks? Will they be a mixture of different datasets? Or will it be compiled from Eurostat data? Or will the EU decide to base it on a new type of dataset? None of this is known yet,” said one representative with an industry organisation.  

The EU’s ‘Biofuels Barometer’ shows that the use of biofuels as a percentage of transport fuel was 4.8% in Germany and 4.5% in the UK in 2016, but for many countries recent data is either preliminary or lacking altogether and in any case a breakdown of crop-based use versus biofuels from waste is unavailable.

The US Department of Agriculture’s ‘Biofuels Annual’, a detailed summary of demand data, estimated that the blending of bioethanol and biodiesel in transport fuels was respectively 3.3% and 5.8% across the EU as whole in 2016.

As a result, the use of crop-based biofuels in most EU member states last year was likely to have been well below the 7% threshold favoured by the Council, given that many countries use high volumes of used cooking oil for biodiesel and biofuels use is not expected to have risen much.

Incremental increases overall in biofuel use are part of the reason why some EU governments have been considering increases in blending requirements so they can meet their 2020 targets on the use of biofuels in transport fuels mandated by the EU.

Many of them are lagging behind, and are trying to encourage greater use of second generation biofuels, such as used cooking oil, in order to meet their targets.

Agreement

The compromise amendment is likely to garner wide acceptance in the EU plenary given that MEPs are likely to vote along party lines.

However, other amendments may appear on the EU Parliament website before 17 January that may take a harder line on crop-based biofuels, said staff working for MEPs.

The Green group in the EU Parliament, which has taken the lead on the issue through Dutch Green MEP and rapporteur Bas Eickhout, said it was considering how to respond to the compromise amendment.

The agreed text drawn up by the European Parliament’s three main parties has attempted to balance the widely differing views of various EU member states.

National priorities

Some, such as the Netherlands and the UK, favour tight caps on the use of crop-based biofuels, while countries such as Hungary and Poland want a high threshold to provide income streams to their large agrarian sectors.   

Industry lobbies want a sufficient threshold for biofuel use that will protect investments made by members to supply biofuels.  

This week’s compromise amendment also aims to design an emissions factor that would effectively ban palm oil from being used to meet renewables targets.

However, the commodity won’t be singled out specifically for fear of provoking economic reprisals from producer nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia or a dispute in the WTO. 

Even if the compromise amendment gets a strong majority in the plenary vote, it is still subject to potential revisions in Trialogue discussions with the Commission and Council.