Empowering renewable ethanol to make Europe’s Green Deal real

ePURE Secretary-General Emmanuel Desplechin writes in Ethanol Producer Magazine:

"The European Union has set ambitious goals for carbon neutrality by 2050 under its Green Deal agenda. To achieve them, it can’t afford to wait for new technologies to develop. Making progress in the race to decarbonise transport means taking advantage of solutions that work in the short-, medium- and long-term.

"Renewable EU ethanol has an important role to play in all of those timeframes, including in the remaining months of 2020. With the year more than half over, EU Member States are still struggling to meet their 2020 targets under the Renewable Energy Directive and the Fuel Quality Directive.

"Those targets are important because they help set the bar for the next set of goals, in 2030. EU decarbonization ambitions for the next decade have been set in the recast Renewable Energy Directive (RED II). But the potential contribution of ethanol—more than 72 percent average greenhouse gas reduction compared to fossil petrol in the case of ePURE members’ ethanol—is hampered by a cap on crop-based biofuels."

Read the full article here.