Australia to Raise Biofuels Consumption: USDA

Jan 04, 2022

Australia’s federal government will implement new fuel standards for gasoline from 1 January 2022, which may significantly raise the ethanol blend rate in the country and boost demand for imports.

Under the new fuel quality standard, Australia aims to reduce maximum aromatics content in the gasoline pool to 35pc from 42pc on a volumetric basis. Ethanol will be the primary substitute for aromatics and Australia will need to approximately triple its bioethanol use on the year to 550mn l in 2022.

Additional ethanol demand in 2022 will be met mostly from imports, according to the USDA, as there are no indications that domestic capacity will increase in the short term.

Ethanol and biodiesel blending rates are both set to decline in 2021 from 2020 levels according to USDA data, due to no federal government subsidy, tax credit or mandate supporting the production or use of biofuels. Only two states have biofuel programmes with ethanol and biodiesel mandates, but these mandates are far from being reached.

Ethanol

Ethanol consumption in Australia is forecast to decline by 5mn l from 2020 to 175mn l in 2021. It will comprise only 1pc of the gasoline pool of 16.9bn l in 2021, mainly driven by reduced production after a third of ethanol production facilities closed in September 2020.

Expected ethanol production in 2021 is 180mn l, lower by 10mn l from that in 2020. There are no indications the closed plants will reopen in the short term, and there have been no new bioethanol facilities built in the last 10 years. As a result, additional ethanol demand in 2022 will need to be met mostly from imports. Imports of denatured ethanol are forecast to increase slightly to 10mn l in 2021 from 5mn l in 2020.

Biodiesel

Australian biodiesel use is also forecast to decline to 13mn l in 2021 from an already-low 18mn l in 2020, taking up only 0.1pc of the total diesel pool of 16.358bn l in 2021.

B5 biodiesel fuel is the most common blend used in Australia while the B20 is generally sold for commercial operations and is labelled, although there is also an Australian fuel standard for pure unblended biodiesel (B100).

Biodiesel production is forecast to decline to 18mn l in 2021 from 27mn l in 2020, after one of the domestic producers ceased production in the middle of 2021. The three remaining biodiesel producing facilities in Australia using mainly tallow and a small proportion of used cooking oil (UCO) feedstock, have also suffered from a drop in feedstock supply during Covid-19.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”