The U.K. has been planning on requiring 2.5 percent of all road fuels sold to come from biofuels, rising to 5 percent by 2010, as part of a plan known as the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO). The time has finally come for that plan to commence, as April 15 marked its official start.

Transport Minister Jim Fitzpatrick says,"Making it easier for motorists to use greener fuel is an important step towards reducing carbon emissions from transport. It should help save millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide in the coming years." Requiring biofuels is not enough, thought, as the methods used to create the fuels and the sustainability of the process is equally as important. The DfT is on it and, starting in September of this year, the Renewable Fuels Agency will publish reports from fuel suppliers regarding the sustainability and environmental impact of the fuels that they deliver.

There are three ways for suppliers to meet the standards as required by the RTFO:

• By supplying the relevant amount of biofuel themselves
• By purchasing certificates from another transport
• By paying a 'buy out' price in respect of some or all of their obligation

Perhaps we could do without the 'buy out' capability, but we'll be monitoring the situation to see how effective the RTFO is in the coming months. Read the press release after the break.

FREEFLOW, Foot-LITE and User Innovation. These three items make up the UK's Department for Transport short list of ways to "improve transport services." To varying degrees, each of the three tries to green up transporting people while making the transport easier and more comfortable.

The three programs are part of a huge new £8m investment by the DfT into a joint initiative by the Technology Strategy Board, Department for Transport and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Here's a brief description of the programs:

• FREEFLOW will make traffic information better and easier to access. Finding a way around a traffic jam is just as important as knowing that there's one around the next bend, just after the off ramp.
• Foot-LITE is kind of like a broadening of the eco light you find in some cars. If you talk to a Prius driver, you've probably heard about how that realtime MPG screen can affect driving styles. Foot-LITE hopes to develop more and better indicators for drivers to tell them not only how to drive greener but also, like FREEFLOW, avoid congestion.
• The User Innovation project looks as communication between people when they aren't in their cars - better ways to organize carsharing clubs, for example - as well as tapping citizens' ideas for other ideas on how to make getting around an easier proposition.

There are more details available after the jump.

Want to know more about the effects of biofuels on the environment, especially all those indirect effects, the ones that aren't obvious and somewhat hard to calculate? Well, so does the UK's Department for Transport , which has asked the UK's Renewable Fuels Agency to prepare a report on this topic by summer. Once the DfT's Ruth Kelly has seen and studied the report, the department will help the government figure out how best to plot out the EU and UK's biofuel goals in the next decade. The call for a study to better understand the impacts was made following recent reports in Science that questioned just how good biofuels are for the environment. More after the jump.