Scientists Raise Doubts About Biofuels

It now seems that scientists for the European Commission have started to cast their doubts on whether biofuels could ever be produced sustainably in significant quantities. This news deals a big blow to the aviation industry, which wanted to use such fuel as a key way to reduce its own emissions.

It seems that researchers argue that the greenhouse gases emitted in making biofuels may well negate most of the carbon dioxide savings made by replacing fossil fuels. Right now the major concern is the uncertainty over emissions of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.

The road transport industry is also very keen to increase the use of biofuels. Just last year the European Union required that at least 10 percent of all road transport fuels come from plants by 2020. Theoretically the fuels are carbon neutral. This means that when burned they only release the carbon dioxide they absorbed while the plants were growing.

Now campaigners are saying that biofuels are not as sustainable as they seem. They say that more biofuels would mean the destruction of virgin forests and the release of their stored carbon. The EC’s Institute of Energy, Heinz Ossenbrink, said that research carried out by the European Union funded scientists increasingly pointed to a long term problem from large scale biofuel use.

Most of this problem comes from the emissions of nitrous oxide. This is something that is about 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. A lot of older studies that were done do not take this little bit of information into account. Thus, biofuels may not be the way to go at all.