Golden Cropportunity?

In 2024, the European Commission added two crop-based biofuel feedstock categories to ‘Annex IX’ of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED): this categorises them among the most sustainable biofuel feedstocks and confers special incentives for their production and use. The two new feedstocks are (i) crops grown between the main harvests on agricultural land, and (ii) crops grown on severely degraded land; bringing them onto Annex IX could be justified by an assumption that these crop production methods don’t compete with the food market and don’t stimulate agricultural expansion.

In this report for Transport and Environment, we examine this assumption and explore the sustainability issues that are not managed by current regulation. We focus on oilseed crops, which are likely to be in high demand in aviation, shipping, and road sectors in 2030 and beyond, and characterise types of oilseed that are suited to either of the above production systems. These often have the potential to bring agricultural and even ecological advantages; but adoption of these new production systems is far from risk-free, and suffers from many of the same ecological and environmental hazards as other forms of agricultural intensification.

We estimate the lifecycle emissions of biofuels produced from these crops following examples from the literature, and find that they are highly sensitive to the rate of use of agricultural inputs. Using GIS tools, we map potentially eligible growing areas in the EU in order estimate plausible production potentials for compliant feedstock. These fall short of the demand expected to arise from EU transport decarbonisation targets, implying that the EU’s targets could not be met using domestic feedstock only.