Space for Energy Crops - Assessing the potential contribution to Europe's energy future

"The use of land for further energy production in the EU has been the subject of considerable debate. Without much discussion of the evidence in this difficult area there seems to be a perception in some quarters that there is a great deal of currently underused land on European farms that could be mobilised quickly to produce biomass through the planting of energy crops. However the foundations for this assumption appear weak and are in need of further investigation.

This study focuses on the scope for additional production of energy crops in Europe (outside forests), the possible nature and scale of any ‘ spare ’ land and some of the sustainability issues associated with increasing output . Addressing these questions is particularly challenging because of the lack of up to date and specific data on most aspects of this subject. Much of the land use and cove r data available for EU countries does not identify ‘ spare land ’ and is not designed to do so. It has been necessary to draw heavily on our own judgements and elements of the literature to identify the more promising categories of land that might be ‘ spare ’ and to assess their suitability for commercial energy production, at least in principle.

Certain categories of land have been ruled out of the analysis. These include land currently being used for crops or fodder production to avoid any conflicts with food production. Land that is under environment agreement on farms, eg buffer strips is also excluded. Our assessment focuses primarily on land that is currently within the official agricultural area (including some fallow land) and land that in the recent past has ceased to be cultivated (abandoned land) or has been unsuitable for cultivation (contaminated land). Excluding some of these areas mainly for agronomic and environmental reasons, we estimate that an order of magnitude of between 1 and 1.5 million hectares of land could be investigated further for energy crop cultivation. This figure may be on the high side in that it includes significant areas that are not identified easily in current agriculture or land use statistics. "