By Julio Godoy
PARIS, Oct 19 2006 (IPS)

France got into first gear for a clean drive this month with the opening of a bio fuel pump. But barely after the start, environmentalists are saying that the ecological balance sheet from using this green fuel may still be negative.

The new bio fuel, the E-85, costs only 80 euro cents a litre instead of 1.60 for normal fuel. It is meant to reduce emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that warm the atmosphere, and so are thought to lead to harmful climate change..

The E-85, produced mostly from beets and cereals, contains only 15 percent fossil fuel, and emits 70 percent less carbon dioxide than normal combustibles, officials say.

The E-85 pump that opened in Paris Oct. 9 is part of a government programme to raise consumption of bio-combustibles to at least 10 percent by 2015.

“By the year 2009, some 500 to 600 bio fuel bumps will be functioning in France,” minister for finance and industry Thierry Breton said at the inauguration of the first E-85 pump. “At the same time, the French automobile industry has promised that in two years time half of all cars sold in France will be equipped to burn this bio fuel.”

Breton said the programme aimed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, and also encourage energy independence. “We want to show the oil producing countries that France has an energy alternative to fossil combustibles,” Breton said.

According to official figures, France emits a yearly average of 525 million tonnes of greenhouse gases as measured CO2 eq, a unit of potency in warming the atmosphere, with carbon dioxide taken as a unit of one. Methane, for instance, is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide in heating the atmosphere, and so it is CO2 eq 21.

The ceiling of emissions set on France under the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to curb such emissions, is 500 million tonnes a year.

Most French emissions come from transport and inefficient house heating, according to a report by the Inter-ministerial Commission on Greenhouse Effects (MIES, after its French name) released in 2004. Transport produces 26 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in France.

The MIES reported that private automobiles released 57 percent of all transport emissions. It also found that emissions from transport have risen more than 26 percent since 1990, although they have stabilised somewhat since 2002.

The new move aims to cap further emissions. At a meeting with farmers representatives Oct. 5, President Jacques Chirac announced the launching of a “second generation” of bio- fuel “which would use the whole plant, and not only the grains.”

Chirac spoke of “a European green chemical industry” based on “an agriculture both ecologically responsible and economically powerful”, and said that “with the development of new technologies, new frontiers appear for agriculture.”

French farmers seem pleased. “New promising perspectives are being opened for French agriculture,” Jean-Michel Lemétayer, president of the National Federation of Farmers said in a statement.

But in the face of this new push, some experts and environmental activists warn that the green figures on offer could be misleading. Intensive cultivation of beets and cereals could itself come at an environmental cost, experts say.

“The ecological balance sheet of the so-called bio-fuels is negative, since it is based on the intensification of agricultural practices, especially of cereals, which heavily depend on pesticides, other noxious chemical products, and even genetically modified organisms,” the French Federation of Environmental Associations said in a statement.

Former minister for the environment Corinne Lepage said that “to produce one litre of ethanol, you still need to burn one litre of oil.” Lepage, who served under Chirac in the mid 1990s, told IPS that “the government programme for bio fuels is a step in support of traditional agriculture, not in support of the environment.”

Excerpt: