As someone who started working in biofuels over a decade ago, the year 2020 carries special significance, if only because all targets in the original Renewable Energy Directive (RED), adopted in 2009, were set to be achieved this year. 

One used to wonder what 2020 would look like for the sector both industry and policy-wise - and here we are, what a decade it was! In the meantime, we saw RED altered first rather moderately by the so-called indirect land use change (ILUC) revision in 2015, effectively capping the contribution of conventional biofuels, and lately and quite more substantially, by the legislative procedure resulting in REDII, concluded in December 2018, which in principle was meant to set out the regulatory framework for biofuels for the whole decade of the 2020s.

The transposition deadline of REDII expires in June 2021. 2020 will then be the year in which several Member States will pass national legislation designed to achieve the revamped REDII objectives, most notably a 14% pan-European Union (EU) collective objective for the use of renewable energy in the transport sector in 2030. In parallel, the European Commission will start adopting some of the dozen-odd delegated pieces of legislation further implementing REDII in areas of major importance, such as electro-mobility, co-processing or biofuels certification. 

Last December, the recently appointed Von der Leyen commission published one of its flagship initiatives, the European Green Deal, a new legislative agenda under which most of EU’s future laws will have a climate action dimension- 

The EU is reacting to a global paradigm shift embodied by young activist Greta Thunberg - and rightfully so.

The annex to the European Green Deal Communication lists a detailed series of upcoming legislative initiatives and revisions to substantiate the Commission’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The first major piece of legislation to that end is the so-called ‘Climate Law’  to be proposed around March 2020. Beyond that, a necessary yet somewhat surprising corollary to the EU’s new ambition is a set of proposals “for revisions of relevant legislative measures to deliver on the increased climate ambition”, including among others, REDII.

The indicative date for the adoption of these revisions is June 2021. It therefore appears that the Commission will be presenting a draft to revise REDII the same month as the deadline for its transposition in Member States. So much for the industry regulatory certainty.

However, this should not be received as a negative development. In application of REDII, the target was meant to be revised in 2023 anyway. An increase in the 14% collective transport target would need to be accompanied by necessary fine- tuning of several other REDII provisions. The 2021 revision will be an opportunity to further improve REDII in order to bring effective decarbonisation of the EU transport sector. From the waste biodiesel perspective, this will be the moment to abolish the unjustified flexible cap on the contribution of feedstocks in Part B of Annex IX (Used cooking oil and animal fats). Obviously, with a 7% CAP on conventional biofuels, more volumes of waste feedstocks will be needed to achieve a new >14% target.

Our industry also hopes that the Commission will equally take this opportunity to correct the unintended negative consequences of indiscriminately promoting renewable fuels in the aviation sector.

To conclude, 2020 will also be the year in which Brexit will finally happen. It will be followed by a transitional period in which the EU law will apply as if the UK were still a full EU Member State that will last between 1 February and December 2020 (and it might be prolonged for one or two years). During this period, the UK and the EU will need to negotiate an ambitious Free Trade Agreement. The biofuels industry at large on both sides of the channel should send a clear message to negotiators: the future bilateral relation must maintain full regulatory convergence in the field of renewable energy and especially regarding biofuels. The british were pioneers in renewable energy policies and for years set the EU agenda in this field. Any potential trade dispute would only result in vast negative consequences for industry, citizens and the climate alike.