US largely absent from UK’s first 2024 biofuel data; Asia volumes decline

There will be five provisional reports in all, with a final report to be published in November 2025 once all the relevant data has been gathered.

Major suppliers to the UK, including the US, China, Indonesia and Malaysia, appear to have significantly reduced their feedstock supplies this year, with the US notably having made no hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) shipments in 2024.

This development bucks a trend during which those four countries – each of which is a significant supplier of feedstocks or fuels derived from palm products or used cooking oil (UCO) – have been taking a bigger share of the UK’s feedstock market in recent years.

But overall volumes have declined because decisions were made, perhaps for administrative reasons, to delay declarations of origins and types of fuels. This came amid increased scrutiny of some flows as well as concerns about a potential increase in fuels originating in China or the US.

Participating parties are not required to release this data until the compilation of the final report, at the end of the compliance period in September 2025, and analysis of the data suggests that hesitation in declaring volumes, feedstocks and origins is playing a part in clouding the data.

According to the report, the total supplied volume of renewable fuel has dropped by 13% to 1.71 billion liters in 2024 from 1.97 billion liters in the corresponding data release for 2023.

However, once delivered into the UK, the fuel has to be validated before a renewable transport fuel certificate (RTFC) can be issued, and those compliance rates have significantly declined year on year, to 39% in this first data cut for 2024, compared with 47% at the same stage of 2023.

Regarding individual countries, the volumes of fuel from China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the US have dropped sharply at this stage of the cycle. Only 97 million liters have been confirmed so far as renewable fuel supplied from one of the four countries, compared with 278 million liters in 2023.

An industry source declined to be quoted on the record but acknowledged that data submission delays could be a factor in this. And if key companies, especially those importing from the US, have been slower in submitting their data, this could account for the lower-than-expected numbers in this initial release.

Lack of clarity

Each of the main priority areas of UK carbon emissions policies has shown a decline in data clarity, with just 7 million liters of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) declared in 2024, with around 6 million liters of that being drawn from China and Malaysia.

That compares with 13 million liters declared at the same stage of 2023, when China and Malaysia accounted for around 9 million liters. In all cases, the feedstock was identified as UCO.

For hydrotreated vegetable oil – a sophisticated type of biodiesel that closely mirrors the performance of fossil fuel-based diesel – the number of countries supplying fuel or feedstock increased in 2024, but overall volumes declared were sharply lower.

Around 25 million liters of HVO has been certified, versus 102 million liters at the same time in 2023, with China’s contribution reduced and the US portion absent.

That contrasts with market feedback, received throughout the year, that there has been a step-up in volumes of renewable diesel coming from the US, which has brought pressure on domestic production margins and prompted comment from UK-based industry groups.

Paul Thomson, of the Association for Renewable Energy and Clean Technology (REA), told Fastmarkets earlier that “cheap [US biodiesel] imports are affecting our members already.”

But US HVO is absent from the first data series – and much of the US contribution to the UK’s biofuel supply is again focused on ethanol.

Just 23,000 tonnes of US-origin UCO-based fuel has been supplied to the UK in the form of waste-based used cooking oil methyl ester (UCOME) biodiesel. It was not classified as the more sophisticated renewable diesel, for which there has been a significant increase in US production capacity in recent months.

Finally, the supply of palm-based products was slashed to 13 million liters, with 10 million liters coming from Indonesia and the balance from Malaysia, while 8 million liters were used to produce conventional biodiesel and only 5 million classed as HVO.

In all cases, the feedstock was palm oil mill effluent. This contrasted with the 2023 data, when 81 million liters of palm-based product had been declared and both palm oil and palm oil mill effluent were feedstocks.

In 2023, Malaysia supplied 18 million liters and Indonesia 63 million liters, with small volumes also supplied from Mexico.

Scrutiny on trade flows

On the primary data, the published update provided insight into how the key elements of the UK’s biofuel market have evolved so far in 2024, with 1.08 billion RTFCs issued by the end of July.

That figure was down from 1.5 billion such certificates issued during the same seven-month period in 2023.

There was also a reduction in volumes in the broader biofuel sector, with general biofuels – typically waste-based – falling to 421 million liters from 594 million liters, and crop-based biofuels dropping by almost 90 million liters to 240 million liters.

UCO, the largest single feedstock, showed a decline in supply to 158 million liters of renewable diesel from 375 million liters last year, with the landscape around the feedstock market undergoing a series of challenges.

In December 2023, the European Commission initiated an investigation in an attempt to regulate the entry of China-origin biodiesel into Europe, primarily in the form of UCOME derived from UCO.

Following this, the Commission recently confirmed that anti-dumping duties will be applied to Chinese biodiesel producers from Friday August 16.

Previous analysis undertaken by Fastmarkets has shown that the UK has reported a steady uptick in the use of palm oil-based feedstocks and an increased reliance on origins such as China, the US, Indonesia and Malaysia.

With the UK now outside the EU, it is no longer covered by EU anti-dumping regulations, nor bound by pre-existing limits on imports from powerhouse producers such as the US, whose ethanol exports have also drawn the attention of EU legislators in the past.

This means that the UK has benefited from access to a wider range of feedstocks and finished biofuels – but potentially at a cost to the country’s domestic producers. Scotland-based biodiesel producer Argent announced in May that it was closing its production unit at Motherwell.

Amid these declines in conventional fuels, there was a notable increase in development fuels, particularly those derived from end-of-life tires sourced from Indonesia, Poland, Slovakia and Sweden.

These tires were converted into 1.2 million liters of development diesel and 852,000 liters of development petrol. These figures were up from the 644,000 liters of development diesel and 460,000 liters of development petrol supplied during the same January to July period of 2023.

Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation

Under the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), the UK mandates a specific percentage-based blend target for the general fuel mix for each year through to 2032. The overall mandate increases annually, while the contribution of crop-based feedstocks is reduced year on year.

Obligated parties in the UK market – those that supply more than 450,000 liters into the fuel mix – must meet the blend targets, but audit data is collected over a long period, and the full balance is not expected to be settled until September of the year following the initial data release.

Over the course of that timeframe, the UK government released five provisional reports detailing the full account of feedstocks used, fuels supplied, countries of origin and the number of RTFCs issued. A final report is usually released in November of the year following the end of the compliance period.

Consequently, final compliance with 2024 targets is not expected until late September 2025, with the final data view for the full year to be presented in November 2025.

For 2024, the UK has a mandate requiring 14.94% of the country’s entire road fuel supply to be drawn from a renewable source, with the use of crop-based feedstocks capped at 3.33%.

Alongside that, the mandate for the use of development fuels was set at 1.37%, meaning that 10.2% of the total UK fuel supply must come from waste-based feedstocks.

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