July the 26th, 2014 was a historic day for the biofuel industry and also for RSPO. On this day, the first batch of RSPO-RED certified palm oil was delivered to our renewable fuel refinery at Rotterdam marking the entrance of RSPO-RED traceable (mass-balance) certified palm oil to the biofuel market.

The market for biofuels is very much different from the other available and typical customer product and manufacturing markets. Sustainability in the biofuel industry is highly regulated; which means for every product to be able to be sold as biofuel - they have to comply with a set requirements determined by the relevant regulators. For the EU market - of which the RSPO-RED was designed for - this means a set of certification
which comply with the European Union Renewable Energy Directive (EU RED).

The RSPO-RED is the 13th scheme to be accepted (in Nov 2012) as compliant to the EU RED. Its entry is relatively late compared to the earlier 12 schemes approved after by the EU commission. Now there are a total of 19 schemes including Neste Oil’s own HVO Verification Scheme. In such a congested
market, it is definitely challenging to be competitive and also to be dominant.

RSPO-RED certification is an add-on to the existing RSPO certification, thus the RSPO-RED also has the credibility of the original RSPO standard; a standard which is placed at the top tier standards in the WWF benchmarking study ‘searching for sustainability’. However it seems the typical problem which RSPO has been facing is also inherited by the RSPO-RED: market uptake. It’s not admittedly easy to . . .