Research Progress
What do we do about palm oil?
Post: 2016-04-27 10:24  View:591

These days, palm oil plantations are about as popular, and popularly criticized for immorality, as a red light district.

 

Just about everyone who is anyone criticizes the trade in palm oil because of the sustainability trade-offs, yet as Cher once observed in her anthemic Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, “every night night all the men would come around, and lay their money down.”

 

Perhaps the nadir for palm was a report in the Wall Street Journal that fingered Malaysian grower Felda for a series of migrant worker abuses on Malaysian plantations — with explosive charges from workers of human trafficking. “They buy and sell us like cattle,” a Bangladeshi worker was quoted in the report.

 

In the world of fuels, Neste Oil has backed away from palm oil in order to expand in the US market on more favorable terms, with palm’s lowly status after indirect land use change modeling factors are added to its greenhouse gas emission profile.

 

But we reported last year that Pertamina plans to invest $200 million with state-owned plantations company PTPN to develop palm oil plantations for biodiesel production. As the oil major has no agricultural experience, it will utilize mergers and acquisitions to gain experience and then will jointly manage the plantations further down the road.

 

Digest reader Jim Cogan points us to a report from the EU on the lan use impacts of biofuels consumption in Europe, released by the European Commission last month after a long delay. Cogan writes:

 

On March 10 2016 the European Commissioned was obliged to release an essential report on the land use impacts of biofuels consumption in Europe as determined by the Commission’s own policy on the matter. The Commission has had the report since the Summer of 2015. The report goes a long way to answering the question of how much better are biofuels for the environment than continued use of fossil fuels. In recent years the Commission has been sharply critical of conventional biofuels yet unable to produce evidence as to why. Reaching a fact based consensus on the matter is essential for transport decarbonisation for 2030.

 

So what are the implications of the report findings for EU and member state transport energy planners who require robust and practical guidance?

 

The target for 1st generation ethanol (for petrol blends) should be increased greatly over the current 7% as these fuels offer huge GHG savings over fossil fuels even after ILUC (land use change) is factored in…Bioethanol and biodiesel should not be lumped together as ethanol is much better than biodiesel…Palm oil must be banned (and not just in biodiesel, but in food and cosmetics too).”

 

The EU writes:

The total land use change caused by the EU 2020 biofuel mandate is 8.8 Mha (million hectares), of which 8 Mha is new cropland and the remaining 0.8Mha consists of short rotation plantations on existing cropland. From the 8.8 Mha, 2.9 Mha of conversion takes place in Europe by less land abandonment and 2.1 Mha of land is converted in Southeast Asia under pressure from oil palm plantation expansion, half of which occurs at the expense of tropical forest and peatland. The abovementioned 8.8 Mha is 0.6% of the total global crop area in 2012 of 1,395 Mha (FAO). This is around 4% of the total land area of Indonesia, or equal to the total land area of Austria.

 

On palm, the EU writes:

Conventional biodiesel feedstocks have high LUC effects compared to the direct emissions resulting from the biofuel production process, with very high emissions for palm oil (231 grams of CO2e per megajoule of biofuel consumed – gCO2e/MJ), high emissions for soybean oil (150 gCO2e/MJ) and 63 and 65 gCO2e/MJ for sunflower and rapeseed respectively; 69% of gross LUC emissions for palm oil is caused by such peatland oxidation after land conversion;

 

If peatland drainage in Indonesia and Malaysia were stopped, the negative greenhouse gas impact of land use change would reduce dramatically. This requires an effort either from the Indonesian and Malaysian governments, all palm oil using sectors (food, personal care products, biofuel) or, best of all, a combination of both. Whether by global action to stop unsustainable land conversion, or by local action to stop peatland drainage, our study shows that LUC values can be reduced by effective policies.

 

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