The parliament has approved a bill on the production and usage of biofuel in the first reading. The document’s explanatory note emphasizes that its aim is to encourage the production, marketing, procession and end-user consumption of this fuel by means of governmental levers. The law suggests, in particular, that, according to European practice, oil refineries and other facilities use a certain amount of such fuels to produce mixed varieties of fuel. A wide-scale use of biofuel in Ukraine will also make it possible to set into motion the mecha-nism of the ratified Kyoto Protocol on reducing carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere.
The draft law consists of 15 articles in six chapters. It is proposed that biofuel comprise bio ethanol, motor and diesel bio fuel, and mixed fuel. The bio materials-based components that can be mixed with traditional fuels are bio hydrogen, biogas, etc.
“The Ukrainian market has an enormous potential for producing biofuel. For example, according to the Ministry for Agrarian Po-licy, the production potential of bio diesel fuel and bio ethanol is one million and two million tons a year, respectively. Unfortunately, at present only 100,000 tons of bio diesel fuel and a little over 200,000 tons of bio ethanol are produced each year. The same applies to biogas — the potential of its production by farmers is 2.45 million tons of equivalent fuel. Experts estimate that only a few of the theoretical 3,000 biogas facilities actually function,” says Olena Rybak, director of the European-Ukrainian Energy Agency.
In her opinion, some political and economic factors still hinder reaching the projected targets. “It is, above all, political decisions,” Ms. Rybak adds. “There are two bills on bio diesel fuel and bio ethanol market stimulation that await parliamentary consideration. Should those laws be passed, Ukraine will make public its bio-fuel usage targets for the transport sector, which may account for 80 percent of bio diesel fuel use by 2015 — in proportion to the amount of produced diesel fuel, and 30 percent of bio ethanol – in proportion to the production of gasoline.”
At present though Ukraine is in some ways playing the role of a raw material supplier. Rybak says that the EU imported 2.3 million tons of rape from Ukraine in 2008-09, for 1.35 billion dollars. This is because, the expert explains, the high prices on the world market have made it profitable to export “raw” rapes or rape oil. It is commercially unviable to produce bio ethanol without domestic market subsidies, she stresses. The key energy expert concludes that producing biogas from organic wastes may be more profitable, but this would require solving such important problems like those pertaining to green tariffs, licensing, and so on.
