For over 100 years the world’s economies have run on fossil fuels. Our transport sector has become dependent on one single source of energy: petroleum. We move nearly all of our food, goods, and selves with fuels that come from petroleum. For many decades the paradigm has been to extract oil from beneath the Earth’s surface, refine it, and burn it in our cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes - polluting the air that we breathe and putting carbon, that had been safely stored within the Earth, into the atmosphere.
Now that scientists warn that we must change the way we power our economies, and because of the volatility and costs of petroleum, people all over the world are developing new ways to power transportation including fuels that are made from material collected or grown on the surface of the earth. These new fuels – referred to here as renewable fuels, but some are also called biofuels and some are referred to as “low carbon” or “alternative” fuels – unlock a whole new set of both risks and opportunities.
The enormous diversity in renewable fuel feedstocks, geography, and business practices makes a blanket statement about the sustainability of these new fuels impossible. The sustainability of these fuels varies dramatically depending upon how a fuel is made, what it is made from, and where. They can be enormously beneficial for the world, or they can actually do more harm than conventional fossil fuels. For example, if biodiverse natural forests are burned to make way for crops that are turned into biofuel, more harm than good will be done. In contrast, there are many technologies and companies working to produce fuels that will reduce GHG emissions, displace fossil fuels, contribute to employment and economic growth, and in some cases enhance other environmental and social services.
But how do you know which fuels and companies to support and which to avoid? There are an array of efforts underway to define a set of social and environmental safeguards and label sustainable renewable fuels and particularly biofuels. Some are feedstock specific. Some are geographically oriented. Some are being developed by industry and some by academic and non-profit actors. Some are legal requirements and some are voluntary.
For the purpose of our data collection and rankings, we allow companies to provide documentation of any sustainability certification they have obtained. Currently the only sustainability certification system that encompasses all renewable transport fuels, is global, is multi-stakeholder, and followed the ISEAL best practices for transparency and inclusiveness is the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB). The RSB is a voluntary sustainability certification scheme that has just recently begun certifying producers. It is working to streamline its process and to harmonize with EU and US legal sustainability requirements so as to facilitate the marketplace with credible, rigorous sustainability standards that do not become a market barrier.
A proliferation of standards would actually inhibit the industry’s growth by making it hard for producers who would have to get different certifications in order to sell into different markets.
