On May 1st, the Royal Decree 235/2018 was published in the Official Gazette regulating the sustainability criteria of biofuels and bioliquids, the National Verification System for Sustainability and the double value of some biofuels for the purpose of its computation; and an objective indicative of sale or consumption of advanced biofuels is established. The Royal Decree comes into force on the day following its publication, that is, on May 2, 2018 and European industry is very aware of this because Spain is a very large market and it is estimated that 1 million tons of biodiesel will will consume in 2018. Personally I think that the thing remains as it was, for what I go to the literalness of the text (page 46939): “For the certification of biofuels for the purposes of the provisions of this article, raw materials and The corresponding biofuel must be accompanied by the information and documentation that proves its origin and origin, in the form and with the periodicity that the certification body establishes, and other requirements that may be considered appropriate, where appropriate, may be established. The effects of defining control measures for double counting, to minimize the risk that the same item is declared more than once or that they are modified or discarded. intentionally used raw materials in order to be included in Annex IV. Also, the certification body may define what is meant by oil use. “There are established a series of preconditions to be fulfilled by the Biofuels Certification Entity, and those are what I believe have not yet been done. We have DC still in Spain To summarize, if before there was no DC because there was no CNMC circular and the adaptation of SICBIOS, now we would be exactly in the same situation, in this context, that the RD will enter into force on May 2 (page 46944) would be the least of it.
One big doubt that we all have in this sector is whether there will be retroactivity when the CNMC and the SICBIOS are ready, that is, if when they publish everything that needs to be done, there will be retroactivity from May 1st. Operators can submit all sales documentation from May 1, 2018 and they will be worth the certificates even if they submit it on January 1, 2019 for example. My opinion is that this will not be the case since the framework does not vary from what we had since 2014. Change the list, yes, but until the CNMC can not implement the technical and regulatory instruments for implementation it will continue in the Limbo and hopefully it will be a reality for January 1, 2019. At the moment we will have to keep waiting.
Download the regulations: BOE-A-2018