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Biofuel plan: An artist's impression of the power station proposed for Avonmouth
By Susie Weldon
Bristol’s green activists are mounting an urgent campaign against a proposed biofuel plant in Avonmouth because they say its plan to import palm oil is environmentally damaging and unsustainable.
Bristol City Council is considering a planning application to convert part of the former Sevalco (Columbian Chemicals) site on Severn Road into a large biofuel power plant using fuels imported through Avonmouth Docks.
The application to build a 50MW power station at Avonmouth to create green electricity to feed into the National Grid was lodged by W4B Bristol.
In its planning statement, W4B Bristol said the plant would employ 30 people and burn 90,000 tonnes of vegetable oil every year and the oils used would include jatropha (also called Barbados nut or physic nut) and palm oil.
However, in the last few days, a campaign against the proposal has swiftly gathered pace in cyberspace, with green bloggers and bodies such as Bristol Friends of the Earth urging people to voice their objections.
Mike Birkin, regional campaigns co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth South West, said the problem was that growing vegetable oil in the huge quantities needed for biofuels was the major driver of deforestation and hence climate change.
“The application is presented as if it were a ‘green solution’ whilst in fact it is particularly unsustainable,” he said.
Both jatropha, a poisonous shrub belonging to spurge family, and palm oil have significant environmental costs when used in industrial quantities, he added.
Clearing land to grow palm oil has been blamed as a major cause of the destruction of rainforests around the world, which absorb nearly a fifth of all man-made carbon emissions.
Yet nearly a third of the world’s rainforests have been lost in the last 50 years – and an area the size of a football pitch is destroyed every four seconds, according to the Prince’s Rainforest Trust.
Palm oil is now a major export of countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, said Mr Birkin, and most of it was being grown on recently cleared rainforest.
“It has been calculated that due to this change in land use, the oil palm trees will take 400 years to capture the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that was released to make way for them,” he said.
“There is no way in which the resulting palm oil can be seen as being carbon neutral.”
Campaign group Biofuelwatch also criticised the use of jatropha, saying: “Jatropha is not yet commercially available, many plantings are failing, yet thousands of people have already lost their land and livelihood for jatropha plantations to feed Europe’s biofuel market.”
Until recently, biofuels were regarded as the answer to the problem of high greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector: swap fossil fuel-dependent oils for biodiesels made from plants and a cleaner, greener future beckoned.
Governments also embraced biofuels as the solution to diminishing oil reserves. The European Union has proposed a target of 10% of all fuels to come from biofuel by 2020.
But the environmental costs have coupled with global food price rises. A confidential World Bank report leaked last year stated that food prices have risen as much as 75%, as farmland is used to grow biofuel crops.
Was it right, campaigners began to ask, that people in poorer countries should go hungry just to feed the developed world’s insatiable appetite for fuel?
At present there are no biofuel power stations in the UK, although planning permission has been granted to build one in East London.
But last month, an application by W4B Renewable Energy (which like W4B Bristol is registered to the same Pitton, Salisbury address) to build a biofuel power station in Portland was rejected by Weymouth & Portland Council amid concerns about sustainability.
Bristol24-7 attempted to contact W4B Bristol several times to comment on the proposals but received no response.
Further reading
But Jorge have you not seen the concerns the United Nations have about industrial scale biofuels??
The following paragraph from the story is innacurate.
“But the environmental costs have coupled with global food price rises. A confidential World Bank report leaked last year stated that food prices have risen as much as 75%, as farmland is used to grow biofuel crops.”
World Bank does not produce “confidential” reports. The report was developed by a World Bank economist and never endorssed by the Bank. It has been rescinded and the author has lost all credibility because long after food prices have declined biofuel expansion has continued to increase.
Additionally, there are bodies that can certifiy that Indoensian Palm Oil is being produced in a sustainable manner without deforestation, drying peetlands, or releasing greenhouse gasses.
The information provided in this article appears to have been supplied by an environmental NGO with a specific agenda. While I don’t know enough about the proposed Bristol plant to endorse it, I do know enough to say that the article was very biased in favor of the special interest environmentalists