Environmentalists have long warned that many plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, where 85 percent of commercial palm oil is grown, were planted on cleared rain forest, threatening the home of endangered animals like the orang-utan and the Sumatran tiger.
Now, after calculating the carbon balance of producing palm oil fuel, it was found increasingly negative. As a result few companies have already put plans on hold to switch to palm oil.
The PEAT-CO2 report published last year (http://tinyurl.com/ymlq3r) pointed out how some plantations produce far more carbon dioxide than they save. Seeded on drained peat swamp forest, they unleash large amounts of carbon from the peat.
Palm oil is an ingredient in cooking oil, cosmetics, soaps, bread, chocolate – in fact, in about one in every 10 products on the supermarket shelf. It also is used as an industrial lubricant.
It is attractive for bioenergy because it is relatively abundant, cheap at about US$550 / €420 per ton, and more easily integrated into existing power stations than most other alternative fuels.
Unlike carbon-rich fossil fuels, production is considered carbon neutral, meaning the carbon emitted from burning palm oil is the same as that absorbed during growth. But the surrounding environmental cost is becoming increasingly apparent.
An estimated 600 million tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere every year from drained peat swamps and another 1400 million tons go up in smoke from (rain) forest fires often deliberately set to clear new land for plantations. Together, those 2 Gt of CO2 amount to 8 percent of global fossil fuel emissions.
These figures have yet to be independently verified by the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn (Germany), by the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., or by academic experts. But all said the research appeared credible.
Awareness of the vast amounts of carbon released from degraded peatlands is so new that the problem is not included in the recently published IPCC reports. The IPPC 4th Assessment summary report led European leaders to approve a bold plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 – and increase that to 30 percent if other countries join. Part of that goal would be achieved by converting at least 10 percent of Europe’s energy supplies to biofuels.
Despite this pressure to replace coal, oil and gas with cleaner fuels, major power companies in Britain and the Netherlands have scrapped plans to partially convert electricity generation to palm oil.
After investigating the matter RWE, Britain’s largest electricity supplier, decided against palm oil because it could not verify all its supplies would be free of the taint of destroyed rain forest or peat bogs.
The Dutch power company Essent also announced in December it had suspended the incineration of palm oil until it can trace and verify the sources.
Biox, another Dutch company, said it plans to go ahead with the construction of three 50 megawatt power stations exclusively burning palm oil.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands State secretary of Environment Van Geel apologised for spending hundreds of millions of Euros in subsidies to build new palm oil plants. Van Geel says that the energy companies that have received the subsidies, at that time, met the requirements and therefore the subsidies were just. But he does think things should be done differently from now.
The Netherlands are the biggest buyers of palmoil in Europe and fourth largest worldwide. Last year, 1,5 million tonnes were imported.
So far, the industry’s reservations do not seem to have affected the market. Crude palm oil production rose 6.6%last year and will increase another 5.5% this year to 37 million tons, according to Fortis Bank. Prices have risen 35 percent in the last year and are still going up.
In a twist for the good, the Dutch Minister of Environment Cramer last week presented a report with sustainability criteria for bio-fuels. The report proposes to end all support to bio-fuels which are produced on carbon rich soils like peatlands because of the consequent CO2 emissions. The sustainability criteria were drawn up as a guideline for legislation on bio-fuels by the Dutch government, including targets and subsidies.
These Dutch criteria could have a great impact. The rapidly growing demand for palm oil as a bio-fuel is largely the result of supportive legislation in various countries. With the Dutch governmental committee recognising that palm oil production on peat leads to excessive CO2 release, subsidies and targets will likely halt and pressure will grow to make palm oil production more sustainable. The EU is working on a new Bio-Fuel Directive, which includes criteria for sustainability. The decision from the Netherlands as the first EU-member to present its criteria is encouraging.
With concerns mounting over sourcing, plantation owners joined forces with processors, investors and environmentalists three years ago to form the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil with the aim of monitoring the industry and drawing up criteria for socially responsible trade. But the RSPO has yet to create a foolproof system to verify the supply chain.
Source:
AP, www.corporateeurope.org,
Wetlands International