The European Commission acknowledged on Wednesday that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions linked to the use of some forms of bioenergy — burning wood for electricity, for example — could be overestimated because of a “serious accounting error.”
But the commission rejected the conclusions of a draft opinion by the European Environment Agency Scientific Committee that said that similar problems afflict the calculation of emissions from biofuels for transportation.
The draft opinion, described here in an earlier post, could have wide repercussions. It suggests that a far narrower variety of crops for biofuels and bioenergy should be grown and that organizations like the International Energy Agency and the United Nations probably need to lower their emissions forecasts related to the use of biofuels and bioenergy.
Bloomberg NewsRapeseed, a popular feedstock for biofuels, in a field in Oxfordshire in England.
The European Union is overestimating the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions achieved through reliance on biofuels as a result of a “serious accounting error,” according to a draft opinion by an influential committee of 19 scientists and academics.
The European Environment Agency Scientific Committee writes that the role of energy from crops like biofuels in curbing warming gases should be measured by how much additional carbon dioxide such crops absorb beyond what would have been absorbed anyway by existing fields, forests and grasslands.
Instead, the European Union has been “double counting” some of the savings, according to the draft opinion, which was prepared by the committee in May and viewed this week by The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
The committee said that the error had crept into European Union regulations because of a “misapplication of the original guidance” under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The European Commission this week introduced an open-access online tool to monitor the development of about a dozen low-carbon technologies in the trade bloc.
The commission said its Strategic Energy Technology Plan Information System, offered ways for citizens, researchers, investors and policy makers to map funding for projects in areas including hydropower, wind, photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, wave, geothermal, bioenergy, carbon capture and storage, smart grids, nuclear fission and fusion, hydrogen and fuel cells.
A so-called bubble graph maps the current status and the potential of energy technologies between 2010 and 2050, if funding is forthcoming.
Another tool, an energy cost calculator, allows users to choose different energy and cost situations to compare the performance of various technologies.
The initiative was begun as part of efforts by the commission to raise 50 billion euros of additional investment in crucial low-carbon technologies over the next 10 years.