By Susie Weldon

Green campaigners have been celebrating since Bristol city councillors dramatically rejected their own legal officer’s advice and threw out plans to build a biofuel plant at Avonmouth earlier this week.

So is that the end of the story? Not necessarily.

W4B Bristol, the company behind the application, has not abandoned its plans. It is currently awaiting formal notification of the rejection and will review all options – but is definitely planning to appeal, W4B managing director Chris Slack said in a statement to Bristol24-7.

Add to this the fact that some legal experts believe existing planning law does not allow for the plant to be rejected on its global sustainability impact, but only on its effect on Bristol, and you have all the ingredients for a right royal battle, stage two.

And a battle any appeal certainly would be. W4B’s plans to use palm oil – viewed as deeply unsustainable by the environmental lobby – aroused green campaigners to fury, and they were just as opposed to its plans to use jatropha. Of the 1,121 letters sent to councillors before the meeting, only two were in favour of the plant.

But Lib Dem Councillor Neil Harrison, who has responsibility for sustainable issues for the council, believes W4B would be unlikely to win an appeal.

He rejects the idea that councillors stretched their interpretation of the word ‘sustainability’ far beyond what planning law allows, and says Bristol’s planning blueprint – the Bristol Local Plan – enables the source of fuel used to be considered.

“The debate finally centred around whether the term ‘natural environment’ in the Bristol Local Plan should be understood to apply just to Bristol’s boundaries or the wider world,” he said.

Cllr Harrison said the Plan was “pretty unambiguous”, citing a section which states the choice of materials used in a building could have implications for tropical rainforests, in the case of hardwood materials.

“If anyone can convincingly explain to me how these examples are different in principle from a tropical biofuel plant, I will be very pleased to listen,” he said.

“Last time I looked, Bristol was not over-supplied with tropical rainforests and it did not have a monopoly on ozone. So the Local Plan must be concerned with environmental impacts beyond its borders.”

He also pointed out that the Local Plan called for a precautionary approach to be taken on the grounds that environmental outcomes were not always immediately obvious – which meant councillors made the right decision given the concerns the plant would actually increase global warming.

As well as making a nonsense of the idea of sustainability, it simply wasn’t prudent to rely on “tankering vast quantities of tropical oil all over the world” for our energy supply, he said.

Cllr Harrison questioned whether W4B would go ahead with an appeal given the imminent General Election and the questions already being raised about the subsidies currently available for such plants: “I think they’d be playing a risky game.”

In any case, W4B may find itself scuppered by lack of time – at least if it hopes to pick up the attractive Renewable Obligation Certificate (ROC) subsidies aimed at giving a helping hand to Britain’s renewable energy industry.

In December the qualifications for these ROC subsidies will change dramatically, according to Friends of the Earth’s biofuels campaigner Kenneth Richter.

“By December this year the UK has got to implement the European Union directive on renewable energy and that means that anything considered renewable and qualifying for subsidies will have to meet certain sustainability criteria,” he said.

FoE considers the directive to be “very weak and full of loopholes” but it does state that any biofuel or bioliquid plants must emit least 35% fewer emissions than fossil fuel alternatives – and 60% fewer by 2017.

“Palm oil has been given a default value of 19% emission savings,” he said, “so in effect, by the end of the year, a station using palm oil as a fuel won’t qualify for these subsidies.”

New plants can argue that the palm oil they are using is better than the 19% default value “but these details are still up for discussion”.

A plant that has been approved for ROC subsidies before December 2010 will continue to receive them for 10 years – but, given that a planning appeal generally takes between nine and 12 months, this is a very tight deadline for W4B to meet.

Kenneth Richter rejected W4B’s claim that they intended to use mainly jatropha, saying it wasn’t “necessarily more sustainable than palm oil”. In addition he said:

• Jatropha is not currently available on a commercial scale;
• Despite claims it can grow on marginal land and therefore will benefit poor countries such as Mozambique and Madagascar, the yield is so small that people grow it on prime agricultural land instead;
• There simply isn’t enough information to say it can offer better emission savings.

It was extremely worrying that planners believed they could not reject applications on wider sustainability grounds, he said.

“It is a huge concern and actually the legislation does say that the impact on climate change should be taken into account. Planners need to look across the borders of our own country and they cannot ignore global impacts,” he said. “But there is also a case for legislation to be strengthened.”

Cllr Harrison agreed, pointing out that Bristol planners were working within a legal framework that was 13 years old. Even the Government’s own planning documents were six years out of date, he said: “They predate the invention of tropical biofuels.”

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