The government chose the most expensive path — and is still pursuing it
A tropical grass provides the same tonne of avoided CO₂ at a fraction of the cost of offshore wind, hydrogen or CO₂ storage. And it remains available when the oil runs out.
By Jacobus van Merksteijn
What the report shows
A techno-economic study dated 27 August 2026 compared fifteen energy pathways using one hard measure: how many euros it costs to keep one tonne of CO₂ out of the atmosphere, with everything included — construction, maintenance, transport and end of life. The figures come from primary sources including the European Commission, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, TNO, IRENA, the US Department of Energy and dozens of peer-reviewed studies. Every figure has a URL. No estimates pulled from thin air.
The outcome is uncomfortable for Brussels and The Hague. The pathways Europe is currently investing tens of billions in — green hydrogen, offshore wind and CO₂ storage beneath the North Sea — sit at the bottom of the cost table. At the top is a pathway receiving not a single euro in subsidies: tropical cultivation of Juncao, in which the plant is not burned but separated in stages into fuel, animal feed and construction binder.
What is Juncao?
Juncao is a giant grass that produces 300 to 500 tonnes of fresh biomass per hectare per year in the tropics — roughly four to five times more than sugarcane or eucalyptus. The technology was developed at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in China and has been validated over forty years in more than one hundred countries by researchers from the United Nations. The world record stands at 853 tonnes per hectare, measured in Papua New Guinea in 2017. The report uses a cautious average yield: 108 tonnes of dry matter per hectare per year.
That is the first striking feature: the plant grows on land where nothing else will grow — saline soils, desert margins and exhausted farmland. It therefore does not compete with food production.
Why not simply burn it?
The conventional approach is to harvest and dry the biomass, then burn it to generate electricity. That works, but it is the most expensive way to extract value from it. The report calculates a different sequence. The fresh plant is mechanically opened in the field itself — a cold pressure explosion in which the plant water, with the dissolved sugars, flows directly out of the cells. What remains are two streams: a liquid hydrolysate rich in sugars and proteins, and a solid fibre fraction.
The liquid stream travels in ISO tank containers around the world. At a plant in Rotterdam or elsewhere, it is separated into three outlets:
- Ethanol through fermentation of the hemicellulose sugars — a liquid fuel that fits existing engines and pipelines.
- Protein-rich animal feed — replacing imported soybean meal, with an amino-acid profile closer to fishmeal than to soy in terms of lysine and methionine.
- Furan resin (PFA binder) — a bio-based substitute for bitumen in asphalt and for cement in chemically resistant concrete elements. Durable, pigmentable and suitable for environments where reinforced concrete corrodes — ports, industrial floors and sewers.
The solid fibre fraction can subsequently be gasified into biomethanol — a liquid fuel identical to what BioMCN in Delfzijl has been producing for decades, and one that fits existing marine engines, chemical plants and ordinary liquid-fuel infrastructure.
What does a tonne of avoided CO₂ cost?
Here is the heart of the matter. The study calculates the net cost per tonne of avoided CO₂ for each pathway: the additional cost compared with fossil fuel divided by the emissions actually avoided. The source-based results:
| Pathway | € per tonne of avoided CO₂ |
|---|---|
| Juncao ethanol through fermentation | −67 to +38 |
| Juncao biomethanol through gasification | 37 to 87 |
| Onshore wind (complete, including grid reinforcement) | 132 to 230 |
| Utility-scale solar (complete) | 134 to 200 |
| Porthos CO₂ storage (SDE++ 2025) | 134 to 359 |
| Offshore wind (complete, including cables and grid) | 155 to 310 |
| SAF through Fischer–Tropsch (kerosene) | 210 to 410 |
| Green hydrogen + e-fuels (2050) | 390 to 780 |
The ethanol pathway from Juncao can even produce a negative figure — meaning a net profit for the operator without a single euro of CO₂ subsidy. The biomethanol pathway costs €87 per tonne in the worst case — still two to four times cheaper than the least expensive government pathway.
The figures for wind, solar, CO₂ storage and hydrogen do not come from lobby groups. They come from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency’s own baseline amounts for the Dutch SDE++ subsidy scheme 2025, from tender advice for offshore wind (TOWOZ 2026), and from cost reviews by IRENA and the European Commission itself.
Where the money goes
In 2024 and 2025, the EU and the Netherlands together allocated approximately 15 to 20 billion euros in targeted climate investments. The distribution:
| Destination | Allocated |
|---|---|
| Green hydrogen (EU Innovation Fund + German national funding) | 6 to 7 billion euros |
| Carbon capture and storage (Porthos, Aramis, SDE++ 2025) | 5.6 billion euros |
| Offshore wind (TenneT grid programme alone) | 40 billion euro programme |
| Tropical biomass gasification / Juncao hydrolysate | 0 euros |
The EU Innovation Fund, financed by the proceeds from emissions allowances, had allocated approximately 11.2 billion euros to 199 projects by the end of 2024. Not one project concerns commercial biomass gasification on a tropical scale. The Dutch SDE++ 2025 was heavily oversubscribed for CO₂ storage: applications totalled 10.5 billion euros against 2.4 billion available. The category “biomethanol through gasification” does not exist.
The accounting conclusion is stark. If the same 15 to 20 billion euros per year had been invested in the cheapest proven pathway, it would have delivered four times as much CO₂ reduction. Cumulatively over 2025–2035, the current distribution is estimated to cost 500 to 700 billion euros more than necessary — for the same tonnes of CO₂.
Why it goes wrong
Four structural causes are identified in the report, based on the public methodology documents of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the European Commission:
- European policy steers by shares (RED III: 5.5% renewable fuel by 2030), not by cost per tonne of CO₂. The cheapest therefore does not win automatically.
- The SDE++ may support only projects located on Dutch soil. A plant importing tropical biomass falls outside its scope.
- The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency ranks technologies within predefined categories. If your category does not exist, you never enter the ranking.
- The Innovation Fund requires “innovation”. Proven chemistry using a new feedstock does not qualify — Fischer–Tropsch has existed since 1925, methanol synthesis since 1923.
The result is a system unable to see its own cheapest solution.
The second reason: what remains after the oil?
Proven global oil reserves are sufficient for 50 to 55 years at current consumption. With unconventional sources, perhaps 80 to 100 years, at sharply rising marginal costs. Then it stops. Anyone wanting liquid fuel, plastics, asphalt and marine diesel after that date must have the replacement infrastructure ready before the last barrels are pumped.
And here lies the second argument, one that goes beyond the cost comparison. Wind, solar and hydrogen provide electricity. But electricity is not kerosene, marine diesel, bitumen or plastic. The global economy does not run on electricity alone; it runs on carbon chains. Four and a half billion tonnes of oil a year are turned into liquid fuel and materials, not electricity.
Juncao supplies those carbon chains. One hectare produces ethanol, methanol, animal feed and bio-based resin that can replace asphalt and cement. All four are perpetual flows — the plant grows again every year, on land that would otherwise remain unproductive. Wind and solar produce zero litres of fuel and zero kilograms of asphalt.
To meet the world’s demand for liquid fuel with Juncao biomethanol would require approximately 4 to 5 percent of tropical land — 100 to 180 million hectares. That is substantial, but not inconceivable: it is on the order of the area currently occupied worldwide by oil palm and soy, which are used for far less strategic purposes.
The question that remains
The report supplies figures, not political advice. But its finding is that the most expensive pathways receive the most subsidy, the cheapest pathway receives zero, and only the cheapest pathway continues after the end of oil. It is no longer a technical problem, but a problem of choice.
The question is not whether tropical grass cultivation with complete hydrolysate processing works. Its components each operate at industrial scale — cold pressure explosion in plastics recycling, hemicellulose fermentation at Beta Renewables in Crescentino and POET-DSM in Iowa, methanol gasification at Sasol and BioMCN, PFA resin at TransFuran Chemicals. The question is why the instruments of the EU and the Netherlands have been designed so that they literally cannot see this combination.
Until that question is answered, billions will continue to flow towards pathways that are two to fifteen times more expensive — and that stop on the day the oil runs out.
Sources: TEA report “Integral cost comparison of biofuel pathways and government pathways for CO₂ avoidance and oil replacement” (27 August 2026), based on 347 retrieved source documents including PBL SDE++ 2025 final advice, PBL TOWOZ 2026, IRENA RPGC 2024, EU Innovation Fund 2025 Annual Knowledge Sharing Report, JRC142012, ICAO SAF Rules of Thumb, IEAGHG CO2 T&S Cost Review 2025, UN SDG Juncao presentations by Lin Dongmei 2022 and Lin Zhanxi 2021, and the China National Engineering Research Centre of Juncao Technology (FAFU).