The present mania for biofuels is little more than a ‘scam’, a top scientist has told a conference of the Royal Academy Of Engineering.

Roland Clift, professor of environmental technology at Surrey University, sits on the scientific advisory council of Defra, David Miliband’s environment department.

He told the seminar that promoting the use of biofuels is likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions.

“We would need to plant a land area twice the size of Britain to get enough biofuel crops to halve our emissions,” said Roger Kemp, professor of engineering at Lancaster University. “The numbers simply do not add up.”

“Biodiesel is a complete scam because in the tropics the growing demand is causing forests to be burnt to make way for palm oil and similar crops,” Clift expanded. “We calculate that the land will need to grow biodiesel crops for 70-300 years to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction.”

Clift will also condemn plans to produce British biodiesel from rapeseed, pointing to research showing the crop generates copious amounts of nitrous oxide - an even more powerful global warming gas than CO2

Across the EU the renewable transport fuels obligation will increase this to 5 percent by 2010, with the British government pushing for a target of 10 percent.

The UK Biomass Strategy published last month is, however, also critical of turning crops

into transport fuels, pointing out that this is the least efficient way of using them. It says that it is most efficient simply to burn them.

Kemp and Clift point out that the surging global interest in biofuels derives from a ‘false belief’ among politicians that there must be a technical solution to climate change.

Kemp said: ”Underlying all this is the assumption that we have to preserve the mobility and freedom to travel that we now enjoy at all costs.”

However the NFU has been heavily promoting biofuels as an alternative energy source and encouraging the government to back farmers to grow the crops.

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