This month we’re pleased to welcome Jo to the Biofuelwatch team, bringing years of experience as a volunteer campaigner into a new role focused on Drax Power Station. We also report back from an action outside the International Maritime Organization, share new research into ENI’s biofuel expansion in Africa, highlight a new report exposing the flaws of the first project approved under the Paris Agreement’s new carbon market mechanism, and bring campaign updates from California.

Thank you, as always, for your support and interest in our work.

1.Meet Jo our new Biomass Campaigner 

2.Biofuelwatch Demonstrates at the IMO

3.New Briefing: ENI’s Biofuel Expansion in Africa

4.New Report: Carbon Credits Under Fire in Myanmar

5.Campaign Updates from California

Meet Jo our new Biomass Campaigner

We are delighted to welcome Jo to Biofuelwatch. Having been involved in our talks, trainings, actions and campaigns as a volunteer since 2014, Jo now joins the team to campaign on Drax Power Station, with a particular focus on the company’s concerning plans linked to new data centre developments.

The role feels especially fitting as Jo comes from Dorset, home to the Drax family since the 1600s. Growing up, she felt a stark contrast between her love of the county’s forests, rivers and coastline, and her concerns about the political influence and environmental legacy associated with Richard Drax.

Jo is passionate about ending the vast public subsidies awarded to Drax Power Station and supporting a transition towards genuinely sustainable energy solutions. Outside of campaigning, Jo is an enthusiastic upcycler who enjoys making clothes, running, cooking, reading and playing music.

Biofuelwatch Demonstrates at the IMO

In April, Biofuelwatch activists joined a demonstration outside the headquarters of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to protest proposals that could lead to the large-scale use of biofuels in the shipping sector.

Biofuels are often presented as a climate solution, yet many are linked to deforestation, land grabbing and biodiversity loss. They also cannot realistically be scaled up to meet the fuel demands of the global shipping industry without causing severe environmental damage.

Instead of relying on false solutions, Biofuelwatch is calling for measures that reduce overall energy demand and emissions from shipping. Activists displayed a banner and distributed leaflets to delegates entering the building, highlighting the risks associated with expanding biofuel use in maritime transport.

New Briefing: ENI’s Biofuel Expansion in Africa

We have recently published the second report in our new series examining major biofuel producers.

This latest briefing focuses on Italian oil giant ENI and its rapidly expanding biofuel operations across Africa. Our research highlights reports of land grabbing and growing food insecurity linked to ENI’s projects in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo, while questioning the company’s claims about the scale and sustainability of its biofuel production.

The report examines how communities have been affected and raises serious concerns about the role of industrial biofuels in the energy transition.

New Report: Carbon Credits Under Fire in Myanmar

The Paris Climate Agreement includes a controversial new carbon trading mechanism which was finalised at the Climate COP in Baku in 2024. Called the Paris Agreement Crediting mechanism – or Article 6.4 mechanism – replaces the failed Clean Development Mechanism. It allows companies based in one country to buy carbon offsets from another country, according to supposedly “rigorous requirements” devised by a Supervisory Board. The first Article 6.4 offset project ever approved allows the multinational Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO)  to “offset” CO2 emissions from its coal power stations in South Korea by funding a biomass stoves project in Myanmar. 

A new report, which we and three other NGOs have co-published, exposes this scandalous project: The ministry that receives the funds has been MONREC is headed by a Colonel Khin Maung Yi who has been sanctioned by the UK for his role in the military regime which is responsible for countless and ongoing crimes against humanity. The project is being implemented implemented in an area that  has become the epicentre of resistance to military rule, one which has been subjected to airstrikes by the junta. The “carbon savings” are to come from new biomass cookstoves supposed to be more efficient than traditional biomass stoves in the region. Not only is the specific methodology deeply flawed, but it is inherently unfair and unjustified that fuelwood burned traditionally by women and girls in the global South is treated as carbon emissive, yet millions of tonnes of wood burned in power stations – including imported wood pellets co-fired in coal power pstations by KEPCO – are treated as ‘carbon neutral’. As Global Forest Coalition says: “if this is the first project to be credited under Article 6.4, what can we expect from the thousands more in the pipeline?”

Campaign Updates from California

Complementing the growing liquid biofuel campaign work happening in the UK and Europe Biofuelwatch has also continued to raise alarms about the ongoing embrace of deforestation driving biofuels in California. Though the interest in further reliance on biofuels for shipping has been voiced steadily from regulators in the state, it is the state legislature that has most aggressively turned to promoting aviation biofuels. Biofuelwatch contributed to a local grassroots effort from communities most impacted by biofuel refiners like Phillips 66 and Marathon-Neste with a letter to legislative budget committee members opposing a new ‘sustainable aviation fuel tax credit.’ That SAF tax credit has been rejected by the budget committee, but we have heard rumors that negotiations about including this tax credit in the final budget have been taken behind closed doors to pursue a final agreement.

At the same time that this tax credit gift to aviation biofuel producers is being considered, a bill to give environmental review ‘streamlining benefits’ to select SAF projects in the state has come back to life after having been halted last summer and has started moving again in the legislature. Biofuelwatch staff remain attentive and appreciative of partners who have been at the head of the pack expressing opposition to these aviation biofuel schemes moving in the California state legislature.

On another front, climate authorities in California are aggressively moving forward with what would be extremely lenient rules for guiding the development of carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal technologies in the state. We submitted extensive comments to regulatorshighlighting the harmful undesired outcomes that are known to be associated with the pursuit and implementation of these speculative technologies.

To that end Biofuelwatch staff from the UK and the USA participated in a webinar to launch the Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME) Alliance‘land-based geoengineering tool kit.’ 

For those who really want to explore the far edges of climate politics give a listen to this Marketplace podcast titled ‘How to Dim the Sun‘ which features Biofuelwatch staff as critical voice on the intensifying pursuit by the tech billionaire class of far fetched and extremely dangerous technologies like solar geoengineering.