Brussels, 07/10/2014 (Agence Europe) - Another step was taken on Tuesday 7 October to help the EU reduce the carbon footprint of fuels used in the transport sector. The European Commission put forward a proposal establishing a standard for low carbon fuels and announced a simple mechanism for calculating greenhouse gas emissions from road transport.
This proposal is expected to facilitate implementation of the 2009 directive on fuel quality in the Climate/Energy package (Directive 2009/30/EC amending Directive 98/70/EC), which requires transport fuel suppliers in Europe to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% by 2020 over the entire fuel life-cycle, as well as in other energy sources provided for road vehicles. Under this directive, energy suppliers are also obliged to inform the member state designated authority about the level of greenhouse gas emissions from the fuels they supply.
The Commission proposal is a new casting of a text from October 2011 upon which EU member states failed to reach a position (EUROPE 10560). In its original version, the text sought to penalise oil from oil sands sold on the EU market, by taking into account (as part of the 2009 directive implementation) greenhouse gas emissions linked to their production.
Connie Hedegaard, the commissioner for Climate Action, was delighted that, “the Commission is today giving this another push, to try and ensure that in the future, there will be a methodology and thus an incentive to choose less polluting fuels over more polluting ones like, for example, oil sands”.
The proposal establishes a method for calculating the carbon intensity for different fuel types, namely petrol, diesel, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). Each of these fuel types will be assigned a default value based on emissions produced over its entire life-cycle. From now on, suppliers will have to use these values when reporting the carbon intensity of their fuel supply to member states.
This information will be reported by suppliers to member states and by member states to the Commission and will lead to better understanding of the fuel mix used by road vehicles in the EU. This means that any potential increase in the volume of high carbon intensity crudes (such as oil sands), as compared to their 2010 baseline levels, would need to be met by proportional efforts to lower emissions in other areas. This could be achieved through the use of sustainable biofuels and electricity, or for instance, by reducing GHG emissions during fossil fuel extraction. (AN)