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Publish date: May 17, 2016
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Bellona’s response addresses the need to learn from past bioenergy mistakes – including driving deforestation outside Europe, food competition and indirect land use changes – while focusing on the need to look to truly innovative sources for bioenergy, in particular to the oceans and seaweed.
The EU currently relies on bioenergy to meet 60% of its renewable energy target overall, and 90% for the renewable energy in transport target. Bellona is asking that bioenergy continues to play a role, albeit at a vastly improved and potentially dramatically reconsidered manner.
“We need integrated, well-thought through sustainable solutions that take what we have a lot of, like saltwater, to make what we need more of, like sustainable bioenergy” says Bellona advisor Marika Andersen.
“Then we must look at options for integrated solutions, combining for instance offshore wind, aquaculture and seaweed production with advanced biorefining and carbon capture and storage – all the while retaining the cascading use principle at the center” Andersen continues.
Projects like Sahara Forest and Ocean Forest, of which Bellona is a co-founder, are early examples of this.
Bellona works on better understanding the potential of seaweed. While micro algae have benefited from more attention and research, possible energy uses from seaweed are not yet as well studied, but may be significant.
The high carbohydrate content renders seaweeds highly suitable for bioethanol and biobutanol production, where the sugars are fermented. Meanwhile, the low lignin content eliminates many of the challenges currently faced by wood-based bioethanol producers.
Bellona calls on the Commission to further promote sustainable, marine bioenergy for heat and power and biofuels in sectors that can’t otherwise be decarbonised, like aviation.
Bellona further calls on dedicated resources to better understand the environmental risks of industrial scale marine biomass production and to shed light on the difficulties in attaining necessary emission reduction targets and carbon removal without sustainable bioenergy.
Throughout the past year, our mission at the Bellona Environmental Transparency Center has focused on two key, but intertwined issues—nuclear and radiation safety as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drags on, and the worldwide influence of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, which itself is actively involved in the war and has participated in the occupation of a Ukrainian nuclear power plant.
At the beginning of the year, reports in the German and Russian press suggested an approximate 70% increase in uranium imports from Russia to Germany in 2024. But does this reflect broader European trends? It does not. Overall, imports of uranium and nuclear fuel from Russia to Western countries actually dropped sharply in 2024. Unlike the situation in Germany, this is already an established trend.
A Lingen, Germany plant could begin producing nuclear fuel in cooperation with a subsidiary of Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear corporation, which is directly involved in the war in Ukraine and occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution and climate change.