THE QUEENSLAND Government’s decision to mandate a minimum usage of ethanol will help Australia’s ailing biofuels sector according to a long term participant in the industry.
Victorian farmer Steven Hobbs, who has been involved in the biofuel sector for over a decade and has a small on-farm biodiesel factory on his farm, said the Queensland mandate, which follows up on a similar program in NSW, was some welcome good news for the biofuel sector.
“Development in the Australian biofuels industry has stagnated and we now see ourselves essentially a decade behind where we could have been, basically because of a lack of investment and positive government policies.”
“It has been the case of everything going wrong that possible could over the past decade.
“we’ve had the global financial crisis and the price of rival products like crude oil drop to their lowest for decades, we’ve had unconventional oils, like shale oil, coming online.
“Along with that, we have had issues competing with biofuel produced in other countries where the manufacturers had tax breaks.”
Mr Hobbs said he believed a viable biofuel sector could be created without governments having to hand out vast sums of money.
“It comes down more to creating operating environments where there are not the headwinds the industry has faced in the past.”
“We’ve seen inconsistent policy which meant people did not feel comfortable investing in the sector.”
He said allowing an easier path to market for secondary products such as dry distillers’ grain or the glycerol created when making biodiesel would alter the dynamic in terms of profitability of biofuel manufacturers.
“A change to remove the roadblocks surrounding the industry would really alter the balance in terms of making a profit in biofuel.”