BIODIESEL IN THE EU: BALANCING SUSTAINABILITY AND TRADE POLICY

The European Union's energy policy has two aspects, as embodied in Article 194 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union: achieving greater energy efficiency and replacing fossil energy sources with renewable ones.

In this sense, biofuels, and particularly biodiesel, which we discuss here, fit into the latter of the aforementioned objectives, since they constitute renewable energy sources intended to replace fossil fuels. However, for the time being, complete replacement is far from being achieved due to various factors that we will attempt to explain.

Indeed, according to Article 2 of Directive 2018/2011 on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources, this type of energy is understood to be “energy from renewable non-fossil sources, namely wind, solar (solar thermal and solar photovoltaic) and geothermal energy, osmotic energy, ambient energy, tide, wave and other ocean energy, hydropower, biomass, landfill gas, sewage treatment plant gas, and biogas”, and biomass is defined as ‘the biodegradable fraction of products, waste and residues from biological origin from agriculture, including vegetal and animal substances, from forestry and related industries, including fisheries and aquaculture, as well as the biodegradable fraction of waste, including industrial and municipal waste of biological origin”.

On the other hand, ‘‘biofuels’ means ‘liquid fuel for transport produced from biomass’ and ‘biodiesel’ consists in ‘fatty acid methyl ester’ (methyl-ester produced from oil of biomass origin), known by its acronym as FAME.

In fact, biodiesel is produced from vegetable oils, which are derived from the seeds or the pulp of a range of oil-bearing crops: rapeseed, sunflower, groundnut, soybean, oil palms or coconut palms mainly. Oil from the rapeseed was the first type used for biodiesel production and it is still the main source of quality biodiesel in Europe.

Biodiesel production begins with pressing the crop, which yields a liquid oil fraction. This oil cannot be used, as such, in vehicles. It needs to be filtered and undergo a process of transformation of the large molecular structure of the oils into a smaller one, similar to the standard diesel hydrocarbons, through the use of methanol (esterification).