B30 withdrawn by largest biofuel supplier

In reaction to the withdrawal of government biofuel subsidies, Morrisons is to stop selling B30, a diesel comprising 30 per cent biofuel, at 144 of its filling stations.

The government is looking to slash its annual £550m spend on biofuel subsidies and has been urged by environmental groups to stop funding biofuels and instead use the money to stop the destruction of rainforests and peatland.

B30 biofuel uptake faced uphill struggle

Despite the fact that many hundreds of thousands of cars are able to run on B30, its uptake has been hampered by concern over the environmental sustainability of biofuels and a reluctance by manufacturers to approve its use.

Most manufacturers played safe by saying that the use of B30 in their cars would invalidate any warranty, but an estimated one million HDi diesel-engined cars made since 1998 were approved to run on E30.

B30 comprises 30 per cent biodiesel and 70 regular diesel. The biodiesel in the B30 sold by Morrisons comprises 50 per cent recycled cooking oil and 50 per cent rapeseed oil that has been processed in Britain.

A spokesperson for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA) said: “Biofuels may reduce carbon emissions in transport, but it is critically important that they do not increase them elsewhere.”

ETA comment: Biofuels

Current European biofuel policy is likely to cause more harm than good because it fails to account for the environmental impact of indirect land use change (ILUC) when calculating the greenhouse gas benefits of biofuels.

When farm land is converted for biofuel production, it is highly likely that areas elsewhere will be converted for agriculture – a process known as ‘indirect’ land use change.

With the European government target requiring ten per cent of road transport fuel to be supplied by bio-fuel, there has been a scramble for new supplies of biofuel and because we do not want to make farmers produce bio-fuel crops instead of food crops we say that bio-fuels must come from wilderness, degraded or marginal land. However, some of this land might, if converted to producing bio-fuel crops produce more CO₂ than it saves. For example, if the land was previously rainforest or a rich peatland. So this has meant that bio-fuel projects are looking to uncultivated land which is not rainforest or peatland.

Africa is full of such land, where ownership is purely traditional and no-one has title deeds. African governments are offering up to forty per cent of their country for big bio-fuel projects. And because the pastoralists and subsistence cultivators cannot prove they own the land they are being swept away in their thousands already.

Unless we ensure that our bio-fuel supplies are socially and environmentally sustainable, we may be pushing the world’s poorest people off their meagre lands.