"The Polish legislative loophole creates significant distortions by decreasing the overall profitability of local biodiesel producers, prompting job loss along the chain, curbing the progress in local energy and protein independence, and impacting the revenues of farmers and protein meal producers" says European Biodiesel Board (EBB).
In a statement July 6, the European Biodiesel Board (EBB), an industry association that represents around 75 percent of European biodiesel production has reiterated concerns over Polish fuel market players that EBB says are “deliberately exploiting” a loophole in the Polish biofuels legislation thereby causing significant financial damage to the biodiesel production chains in a number of EU Member States such as Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and France.
In Poland, the accounting of a given biodiesel volume towards the national blending mandate is based on a simple invoice of purchase by the fuel distributor. As Polish law does not explicitly require the biodiesel accounted towards the blending mandate to be consumed within its boundaries, some Polish operators have, according to EBB, been capitalising on the export of “underpriced” biodiesel, that has already been declared as blended. As a consequence, a large part of biodiesel volumes are counted towards EU national blending mandates twice, a first time – falsely – in Poland and then – at an unfair dumped price – in another EU country.
As a result, an increasing number of EU stakeholders – from farmers through oilseed producers and crushers, to biodiesel producers – are experiencing economic loss and very negative impacts on their businesses.
The Polish legislative loophole creates significant distortions by decreasing the overall profitability of local biodiesel producers, prompting job loss along the chain, curbing the progress in local energy and protein independence, and impacting the revenues of farmers and protein meal producers. The EBB intends to express once again its strong concern about this unfair and illegal situation that remains unchallenged by EU or national competent authorities. We believe that EU authorities cannot accept anymore that European renewable legislation is infringed in a so open and wide scale dimension by an EU Member State and, worse, that an unfair implementation of EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) is taken as a basis for unfair traffics in the EU.
The consequences of the loophole which EBB raised concerns over in March 2016 has led to the expulsion of a former EBB member company found to be directly involved in the Polish “biodiesel trafficking” and that refused to co-operate against such practices. EBB also urges Polish national authorities to tackle the described problem and has been collaborating on tackling this issue with a number of industry players, including sustainability certification systems to “reestablish legality and fair trade” on the EU biodiesel market.
