Hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) and biodiesel industry body the European Biodiesel Board (EBB) has submitted a proposal to the European Commission asking for a series of changes to the renewable energy directive implementing legislation.
The suggested changes came in the wake of three member states asking the European Commission to ramp up its investigation into alleged biofuels fraud and to reject sustainability documentation from Asia-produced biofuels if the producers refused access to member states' agents during a meeting of the Energy Council last May. The commission responded that tracing sources is outside the EU's mandate. Then-energy commissioner Kadri Simson also said she had introduced a plan to energy ministers to strengthen the implementing regulations for certification — the implementing regulation that EBB now proposes changing.
EBB suggests changes to the role of voluntary schemes and certification bodies. Voluntary schemes would have to require economic operators to give auditors specific data underpinning mass balance data, including audit reports and protocols, invoices and delivery notes, and then to make that information available to the commission and member state authorities. The definition of economic operator would be expanded to include traders and blenders that handle the fuel, if they were in a position to process information about the sustainability criteria of the fuel. The change to the definition would bring traders and blenders into the scope of several other requirements, including a proposed expanded auditing requirement for those handling Annex IX fuels. The threshold for on-side audits for Annex IX feedstock points of origin would be lowered from 5t/month to 3t/month.
Certification bodies would also be required to allow supervision by member states via audits, regardless of the country in which they operate. Voluntary schemes would have to require that economic operators allow access at any time to the authorities of the member states for on-site audits. If economic operators or certification bodies refused, the certificate would be suspended until they comply or permanently withdrawn after three months. If withdrawn, any PoS created from that certification would be voided retroactively until the last compliant audit, and other voluntary schemes would have to refuse that operator for at least two years.
Several of EBB's proposals centre around the introduction of a new article requiring that producers using feedstocks from Annex IX of RED, or their representative in the given member state, submit a technical dossier for approval by the state's relevant authority. The dossier would have to be verified by a certification body and include the annual production capacity of the production units and establishing whether the producer can guarantee the type of feedstocks. The member state would then grant approval for a specific time period and quantity of biofuels and feedstocks.
The member state's authority could then pull the approval if the situation changes and makes the technical assessment no longer valid, if feedstock traceability is no longer guaranteed, or if fraud is proven or suspected. If approval is pulled, the proof of sustainability (PoS) would be cancelled and the biofuel could no longer be sold as Annex IX-compliant in that country.
EBB added several other proposals related to the technical approval — a requirement for an annual audit of the approved production units along with traders and blenders which handle the biofuels after the producer, a requirement to make information about approved production units available to the commission and member state authorities, and a requirement for a registry of approved units, traders and blenders in the union database for biofuels (UDB) along with the quantities of approved Annex IX biofuels in a given member state.
Another major proposal from EBB is to change rules for mass balancing biofuels to prevent potential circumvention of anti-dumping and countervailing duties on biodiesel and HVO. EBB asks for mass balancing to be limited to only fuels that have been physically mixed together, rather than allocating PoS to fuels kept in the same facility but not mixed. They ask for auditors to verify that the fuels have been mixed and for country authorities to obtain all customs documentation for fuels subject to anti-dumping or countervailing duties and to compare the country of origin with the country listed on the PoS in the UDB. If the countries do not match or the customs documents are not provided, the PoS would be cancelled.
Other proposals from EBB include having to upload a copy of the certificate of origin used for customs clearance into the UDB and to expand the scope of the UDB to start at the first gathering point for non-crop feedstocks.
They also propose mandatory C14 testing on all biofuels and blends imported by the EU, to show the biogenic content of a fuel. The test results would be compared with the declared biogenic content in the PoS and the customs documents, and the results entered into the UDB.
Finally, EBB would require that sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) not be used in road transport because SAF is not subject to EU countervailing and antidumping duties on HVO. To ensure that, they propose requiring freeze point analysis on all SAF shipments and, if not compliant with jet fuel quality standards, the fuel would be re-declared as HVO and duties paid. They also ask for a 20pc or higher SAF blend customs code.
