Biofuels were once hailed as a clean, green solution to meeting our energy needs. But although a fraction of biofuels currently are genuinely sustainable, most are deeply harmful to the environment. Indeed, some biofuels (including most palm oil) may be more carbon intensive than traditional fossil fuels, quite apart from their negative impacts on local food production and freshwater resources.

Just recently, while scouring my twitter account for stories, I suddenly noticed a tweet from Biofuel Watch calling for support against a planned biofuel plant to be built at Barugh Green near Barnsley. The message included two words that really caught my attention – ‘palm oil’.

According to Biofuel Watch, Barnsley Council have received a second planning application from Rocpower Ltd, a subsidiary of Hargreaves Services PLC. The application is to build a 7 MW biofuel power station which Biofuel Watch state would burn around 10,000 tonnes of vegetable oil every year. Primarily the pressure group is concerned about air pollution, and is intending to object to the plan on that basis. Another concern however is that the plant could be used to burn palm oil.

As many people will undoubtedly know by now, palm oil is a favoured source of biofuel in western countries since it can be used to make palm oil biodiesel. Major producers include the Malaysian and Indonesian governments while other smaller producers include Columbia, Benin, Kenya and Ghana.

According to a 2007 edition of Thomson Financial Malaysia has at least 91 palm oil plants that have already been approved with more on the way. In addition, there is a widespread global demand with Germany and Italy being two of the major consumers.

The problem is however that palm oil is a major factor in environmental destruction for a variety of reasons, the major one being deforestation. This in turn has led to habitat loss, thereby presenting a major threat to numerous forest-dwelling species, most notably the Orang-utan and the Sumatran Tiger. In 2005 Friends of the Earth released a major report which revealed that 87 per cent of the deforestation in Malaysia between 1985 and 2000 could be attributed to palm oil plantation. And it isn’t just a question of deforestation or the threat to endangered species. Palm oil cultivation for biodiesel is a major contributor to escalating carbon emissions. This is due to the fact that a great many tropical forests in Southeast Asia lie on top of peat bogs which store carbon within them.

According to George Monbiot in his book Heat (2006), existing forest trees are first cleared by felling and burning. This procedure in itself unleashes carbon that has been locked within the tree cover into the atmosphere, but then on top of the carbon already released, more carbon escapes when the peat bogs are drained to make way for palm oil plantations. A paper published by Nature estimated that carbon released into the atmosphere from palm oil production in Indonesia in 1997 amounted to between 13 and 40 percent as much as the entire world’s carbon emissions from fossil fuels. That is staggering in itself, but it becomes even more scary when you consider that it is still going on over 13 years later. Monbiot describes the situation in terms of the biofuel industry having “accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.”

This is not to say that all forms of biofuel are necessarily bad, although unfortunately many of them seem to be. There is even a sustainable palm oil association, but I have to say I am not convinced nevertheless. I recently wrote an article for the website Ask The Experts on the subject of Jatropha, a biofuel which at first sight seemed to be more sustainable than many others on offer on the commercial market. Unfortunately, it requires large amounts of water in order to maintain, which of course drains local water supplies, so even that has problems.

My personal opinion is that biofuels in themselves are not the answer to carbon emissions from heating and transport. Graham Thompson from Greenpeace put the situation into perspective for me in a recent email.

“There are sustainable biofuels, for example, biodiesel made from recycled cooking oil is very green indeed” he told me. “If a biomass power station were run on coppiced wood from the local area at below the rate of replacement, that would be sustainable, and the experimental ‘3rd generation’ biofuels from algae or agricultural waste may well be sustainable (although it’s a little early to say). However, in terms of the biofuels commercially available right now, the vast majority of them are worse than fossil fuels, both in terms of their lifecycle emissions, and their impacts on the world’s forests and food supply.”

Personally, I think that says it all.