Page 45 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

Biofuel transitions 39

indirect land use change, and loss of biodiversity. These problems are par-
tially addressed through regulations, standards, and policy schemes. At the
same time, biofuels and other bioenergy policies, together with policies
regarding other bioeconomy sectors (e.g., waste, packaging, forest policies),
are directly influencing the industry, using measurable goals and effective
instruments for the development of bioeconomy in the EU (STAR-ProBio,
2018, pp. 21–26).
The competition of food vs. fuel is directly addressed in many regula-
tions, including 7% limit of biofuels produced with crops from agriculture
land, for example, cereals, oil crops, and so on, in the EU; targets for ligno-
cellulosic biomass in the United States; and support for nonfood crops for
biomass in China and India. However, the development of second-
generation biofuels is very problematic and many regulations, especially
in United States, can be treated as overoptimistic. For example, despite
China started to support nonfood crops for biofuels, corn and wheat
accounted for 80% of feedstock used in the production of bioethanol in
2015. Moreover, although bioethanol in India is produced almost exclu-
sively from molasses (coproduct of cane sugar production), the achievement
of 5% to 10% of blending seems unrealistic because of the strict connection
with sugar production and prices. Biodiesel production from waste cooking
oil in China and from jatropha in India has not been successful yet (Beckman
et al., 2018, pp. 259–260). In turn, in the United States the commercializa-
tion of cellulosic ethanol has been slow, and the 5% limit for cereals and
other related biomass (today 7%) in the European Union was considered
to make it difficult to achieve the target of 10% renewable fuels in transport
(HLPE, 2013, p. 40; Stokes and Breetz, 2018, p. 82).
For these reasons, technological progress on its own is not enough and it
should be combined with additional political and economic instruments and
experts view for a transition to a sustainable bioeconomy. In particular, The
High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) of the
United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) stated that there
is a need to foster the transition from pure biofuels policies to comprehensive
food-energy policies. The latter are very important since they can be “an
effective development strategy to provide high-value products, electricity
and alternative power for cooking, power for water management and local
productive facilities, in addition to transport fuel” (HLPE, 2013, p. 18).
Moreover, transport and climate policies should consider other measures
despite biofuels, including increasing fuel efficiency, developing collective
transport, and alternative renewable fuels.