Solar panels more effective
Biofuels sound like a means with which you can also feed your combustion engine after 2035. But not if you ask development organization Oxfam and environmental organization Transport & Environment (T&E).
The political row surrounding the ban on the sale of new cars that emit CO2 from 2035 in the European Union has not yet been resolved. If only ‘CO2-free’ cars are sold from 2035, this certainly does not mean that you can no longer put petrol in your previously purchased car. Biofuels are sometimes cited as an alternative, whether or not mixed with regular petrol. You can already find it on a fairly large scale in Europe: E10 petrol is commonplace in many (especially Western) European countries and contains up to 10 percent bioethanol. But development organization Oxfam and environmental organization Transport & Environment (T&E) are not happy about that.
According to the organizations, the land for growing crops from which biofuels are made can be better used for food production. The current amount of land in Europe used for the production of these crops can provide food for up to 120 million people a day, according to the organization. Oxfam and T&E base this on research by the German IFEU. According to the German study, it would be a total of 9.6 million hectares, which would be almost equal to the surface of Ireland.
Oxfam and T&E also say that the said land can be used not only for food production, but also for generating energy via solar panels. According to the organizations, you can generate just as much energy on just 2.5 percent of the surface using solar panels as the total amount of energy produced by biofuel crops. Oxfam and T&E call the climate benefits of biofuels questionable. In addition, the land used ‘in its natural state’ can absorb up to 65 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually, according to the organizations that is ‘twice the officially reported net CO2 savings of biofuels replacing fossil fuels’.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl