Biodiesel producers are taking issue with recent comments made by Alberta’s auditor general.
Merwan Saher was highly critical of the way the province has handled bioenergy grant programs in a report released in July.
He said the province has done a poor job of ensuring biofuel projects are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and went so far as to suggest they might be increasing them.
“Publicly available studies and reports (post-2004) conclude that emissions may increase as a result of biofuel production in certain circumstances; for example, when indirect land use is considered,” said Saher in his report.
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That statement upset the Western Canada Biodiesel Association, which met with the Office of the Auditor General of Alberta earlier this month to talk about why indirect land use change (ILUC) shouldn’t be factored into greenhouse gas emission calculations.
“There is a complete lack of any international consensus on how to measure indirect land use change,” said association president Ian Thomson.
ILUC is a controversial theory that suggests some of the environmental benefits of biofuel are negated by the destruction of rainforests and grassland in response to higher grain prices caused by biofuel demand.
Alberta uses the GHGenius model for its life cycle assessment of transportation fuels. It does not include the ILUC factor.
Thomson said the European Union, which has some of the strictest biofuel sustainability requirements in the world, conducted an exhaustive study of the ILUC factor last year.
“They decided not to include it. We think that’s a good indication of where the state of the science is.”
The International Standards Organization also decided to eliminate ILUC as one of the sustainability criterion for bioenergy because of a lack of consensus among its scientists.
However, Thomson thinks the most compelling argument for excluding ILUC from the life cycle calculation for biofuel is that indirect effects are not included in a similar analysis of fossil fuel.
For instance, if ILUC is used to calculate biofuel emission reductions for biofuel, then part of the Canadian military’s emissions should be added to the fossil fuel number because an argument can be made that the military plays a role in protecting energy sources from the Middle East, said Thomson.
“If you measure it on one fuel, you have to measure it on the other.”
Thomson acknowledged there has been shortcomings with the biorefining and infrastructure grant programs that Alberta Energy inherited from Alberta Agriculture.
“In fairness, some of those earlier programs were more focused on rural development, and they didn’t ask for a whole lot of information on specific greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
The oversight has been corrected in producer credit programs that followed the grant programs, he added.
Thomson said there was enough information to make a good estimate of greenhouse gas reduction benefits in the first round of the producer credit program, and the information became far more specific after the program was revised in 2011.
“In defense of Alberta Energy, I think they actually had more information than was credited to them,” he said.
Thomson is convinced that Alberta projects using conventional biofuel technology and Alberta feedstock have reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
