A failure to outline the proposed feedstock for an e-fuel plant proposed for Surrey Hills, Tasmania has led to urgent questions over whether the facility will use native forest or annual agricultural crop waste as feedstock, because the different types of feedstock have quite different environmental impacts, including whether they are actually carbon neutral.

"Use of native forest is unacceptable. Entrenching and expanding native forest logging is an inevitable outcome if native forest feedstock is used, and that would be harmful to biodiversity and to the climate itself, " said Peg Putt - former Greens Leader and now a coordinator of the international Biomass Working Group, which is the major international network campaigning on biomass energy.

"Our native forests are marvellous carbon stores and should be allowed to continue accumulating carbon and providing homes for our precious native species, not be logged, processed and combusted for fuel, sending carbon emissions to the atmosphere whilst annihilating the forest environment."

The proponents must immediately outline their planned feedstock. If annual agricultural residues are used, that's satisfactory as the carbon released will be recaptured the next year by regrowing the crop, but this is not the case for native forests. When they are used for biofuels it takes decades or centuries for the forest to recover and draw down the carbon that was released by the combustion of the fuel, and in the meanwhile that forest carbon is in the atmosphere is adding to climate change. It's well outside the Paris Agreement timelines for action.

"A myth of carbon neutrality has been perpetrated but is now widely acknowledged to be flawed when forests are used as feedstocks for biofuels."

"Surely Porsche doesn't want to be implicated in the destruction of Tasmania's outstanding natural forests?" Ms Putt concluded.