EEA - Bioenergy is not new. For millennia, people have been burning wood. The industrial revolution in the mid-1800s brought so called 'fossil fuels', mainly coal and oil, to the fore. However, fossil fuels are becoming more difficult to find and extract, more expensive, and subject to intense political debate.
Bioenergy is on the verge of becoming big business. It is already the dominant renewable energy source (1) in Europe and its production is likely to increase greatly in the coming decades. Biofuels have been hailed as a good way of greening transport and avoiding expensive oil imports.
The subject of biofuels made world headlines for negative reasons in 2008, mainly in association with rising food prices. The EEA's work on biofuels is restricted to the environmental pros and cons. Even here, there is controversy.
A move towards large scale bioenergy production bears considerable environmental risks, mainly in terms of land-use change. Soils and plants are the two largest stores of CO2 on earth — containing twice as much carbon as our atmosphere. Converting forest, peat or grasslands en masse to biofuel crops would release more CO2 than it would save.
Expanding arable crop production in Europe to satisfy the combined food and fuel demand would have serious impacts on Europe's biodiversity and damage our soil and water resources.
Knock-on effects, so-called 'indirect land-use changes', would impact elsewhere in the world: as Europe cuts back on food exports, other areas of the world would increase food production to fill the gap. Impacts on global food prices could be significant.
However, risks within Europe could be lessened with the right choice of crops and management. Biofuels made from waste, from crop or forestry residues for example, do offer environmental advantages. In this context, the EEA has been looking at how the impending bioenergy boom might develop, and considering whether it can provide the energy we need without damaging the environment.
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