Policies promoting biofuels in Sweden

About the project

Biofuels have been recognised to be one of the key solutions for reducing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transport sector. For quite some time there have been national and international (EU level) policies promoting biofuels and this has indeed led to significant increase in production. But concerns have been raised about the actual societal and environmental benefits of the significant rise in biofuel production and utilisation. Two of the most intriguing concerns are the actual savings of GHG emissions compared to conventional fossil alternatives, and the impact of increased prices of raw material for the production and competition for food and feed purposes.

After these concerns were brought into the light more hope has been set for 2nd generation biofuels that are based on waste products and non-food crop.

The aim of this project has been to describe the current policy instruments applied in Sweden for promoting biofuels, and to make a comparison of supply and demand side instruments and what effects they have had or could have. As background a description of the current use and production of biofuels in the Swedish transport sector is given. The project report also discusses the difference between first and second generation biofuels briefly, with focus on the rational for policy instruments making a difference between the two categories.