The canola industry has a record of setting lofty goals and actually meeting them. I recall lots of us thinking that the council’s goal of six million tonnes per year by 2006, or maybe it was seven million by 2007, seemed pretty unrealistic when it was announced. Now six million tonnes would be a crop disaster.
The goal now is for 15 million tonnes by 2015, and it seems quite possible to meet on the production side.
“We will reach that target through both yield and acres,” Joanne Buth, the council president, said a minute ago.
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But the demand to eat that up needs to be found, and some of that is hoped to be in the form of biodiesel production. The Canola Council of Canada’s 2015 demand goals include two million tonnes of seed for domestic biodiesel demand. That’ll depend on the biodiesel industry growing, and that’s coming ever so slowly. There’s lots of frustration among biodiesel promoters about the Canadian government’s extremely lukewarm support of biodiesel.
That feeling is shared by American biodiesel advocates too, as attendees here heard yesterday afternoon from Andy Karsner, a former U.S. assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. “That market will be there if the governments can get out of their own way,” said Karsner, attacking the backsliding in government support for energy independence.
Karsner said he thinks the mood will change, so canola producers need to keep committed to it, even if the present mood seems less than supportive.
“You need to get ready” for that change in attitude, he said.
Canadian biodiesel advocates enjoyed Karsner’s impassioned defence of the industry, but some ruefully noted afterwards that the support Karsner noted as weakening in the U.S. is still many times more supportive than the situation in Canada.
So will that biodiesel demand be there by 2015 to eat up those two million tonnes of canola set aside for it?
