Agriculture's role in green energy highlighted

Little more than 60 per cent of the Earth's arable land will be needed for food by the year 2050, a Danish expert told the National…

Little more than 60 per cent of the Earth's arable land will be needed for food by the year 2050, a Danish expert told the National Bioenergy Conference in Tullamore, Co Offaly yesterday.

Prof Jens Bo Nielsen of the bioenergy department of Aalborg University, Denmark, played down fears of a major scarcity of land, saying there should not be conflict between crop production for food and fuel.

He said his figures were based on consumption trends and assumed that demand for food production would also increase.

By 2030, he said, it would be possible to meet 20 per cent of the energy demands of all 27 members of the European Union from biomass and biogenic waste, without harming the environment or being in competition with either food for animals or humans.

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A Teagasc energy crop specialist, Barry Caslin, said 70,000 hectares of willow and miscanthus (perennial grass) would be required by 2015 to meet the electricity and heat targets set out for Ireland under the Kyoto agreement.

He said 42,000 hectares of energy crop would be required to meet the targets set for co-firing the three peat-burning stations, which are required to have a 40 per cent co-firing target by 2015.

To meet the targets set in the commercial sector, 19,470 hectares of biomass would have to be planted by 2015, and 43,140 hectares would need to be grown to meet the residential sector requirements.

The director of Teagasc, Prof Gerry Boyle, whose organisation jointly hosted the conference with the Irish Bioenergy Association, said the bioenergy sector could help to improve national competitiveness by reducing the demand on energy imports.

"As a rough guide, each 1 per cent of farmed land devoted to biofuels could supply 1 per cent of the national energy requirement," he said, adding that the production of biofuels was expected to quadruple in coming years.

Prof Boyle warned that while this was very positive, serious concerns had to be addressed, such as the fact that poorly managed production could increase rather than cut greenhouse gas emissions.

He claimed that agriculture's contribution to the production of carbon emissions had been effectively nil since 1990.

Between then and 2007, cattle numbers grew by only 3 per cent, while estimated emissions from agriculture fell by 3 per cent and emissions from transport grew by 166 per cent.

Kristina Birath, co-ordinator of the Ethanol Bus Buyers Consortium in Sweden, said the number of cars powered by ethanol had risen from 5,000 in 2004 to nearly 70,000 in 2007, while the number of ethanol fuel stations rose from about 100 in 2003 to more than 900 this year. She said cities such as Stockholm and Gothenburg were driving the demand for clean vehicles in their own bus and maintenance vehicles.

Mary Wallace, Minister of State for Agriculture, told the 300 delegates she had provided sufficient funding in 2008 to support the planting of up to 1,600 hectares of miscanthus and willow. She urged those interested in growing these crops to apply for grants before the end of March.

Economist and journalist Richard Douthwaite said every rural community should be operating a bio-refinery, extracting the most valuable components from biomass grown in the area, and should send these for further processing.

This could provide heat and electricity to the community and return nutrients to the soil by sequestering carbon which would slow climate change and allow greater amounts of biomass to be grown the following season.

Closing the conference, Vicky Heslop, president of the Irish Bioenergy Association, called for a long-term strategy for the growing of biocrops to allow growers to prepare for the future.