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Paying for biofuel with the environment

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/09/15/your-letters-paying-biofuel-with-environment.html

Mon, September 15 2014, 10:38 AM

Biofuel has long been seen as the cure for our oil addiction. As an alternative source of energy, biofuel is said to be “carbon neutral” and has great potential to reduce Indonesia’s dependency and expenditure on petroleum-based fuels. Iwan Ganiwa, the director of energy studies at the University of Indonesia, said that the government could save about US$3 billion per year through the increased usage of biofuel.

Indeed, over the last decade, the government has deployed targets for biofuel production, established an array of fuel-blending policies and offered investment incentives for the development of a national biofuel industry. The government has, for example, set a regulation that requires a blend of at least 10 percent biofuel in diesel used by commercial businesses, as well as the mining and mining services sector. Going forward, the government is also enforcing a 2 percent mixture of biofuel for commercial airlines. Companies like Wilmar and MedcoEnergi have started to respond to incentives by building and investing in large biorefineries in Indonesia.

Given that biofuel is becoming a point of focus on our energy agenda, it is important that we carefully review the environmental trade-off of biofuel production that we so often overlook.

Biofuel’s main attraction is its potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because, even though biofuels give off CO2 when burned, the amount that they release is equivalent to the amount that has been absorbed from the atmosphere by the crops used to produce them. This perception of biofuel as “carbon neutral”, however, often misleads us to think that biofuel is necessarily better for the environment.

When we start taking into account the environmental costs that arise from the production and the processing of biofuel feedstock (e.g. oil palm, jatropha, sugarcane), the purported environmental advantages of biofuel become less apparent. The production of biofuel necessitates high-energy input and demands large fields of land to be converted to feedstock plants. This land requirement often implies direct and indirect deforestation, which may well result in biodiversity loss, air pollution and the loss of the converted forests’ ability to absorb greenhouse gases.

Feedstock plantations themselves have adverse effects on the quality of air, water and soil. Plantations reduce the soil’s ability to retain water, which, unintentionally, leads to increased flooding during rainy seasons. Increased use of pesticides and other agrochemicals leads to contamination of surrounding rivers and streams and reduces the availability of clean water.

Large-scale land acquisition for oil-palm plantations has also been associated with the marginalization of local communities and land grabbing. By definition, adat (customary law) gives customary communities the right to use customary land or traditional forests based on Article 18 of the 1945 Constitution, but these rights are subordinated to national objectives — and, in this case, the development of the biofuel industry.

The popular perception that biofuel is “green” and environmentally good must be changed. And we ought to exert greater scrutiny over how our biofuels are being produced. This is the first year the government is implementing its Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) standard with the aim of ensuring more sustainable palm-oil production. Instead of ignorantly pressuring the government to produce more biofuel, we ought to reassess the environmental costs of biofuel and ensure that we only produce biofuel in a manner that does not absurdly spoil our precious environment.

Priscilla Liu Jakarta