Five European member states will work together to improve supervision of the use of biofuels. Now that the sector is growing, this is necessary to guarantee the sustainability of biofuel. A coalition of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands has concluded that European cooperation is needed for this. The countries are therefore calling on European Commissioners Frans Timmermans and Kadri Simson today to quickly work on better supervision and enforcement at European level.

Better enforcement

Europe has ambitious climate goals. For example, all transport must be free of exhaust gases by 2050. Biofuels are still needed for the time being to meet our climate agreements and to make the switch to completely emission-free heavy road transport, inland shipping, aviation, sea shipping and passenger transport. The condition is that durability is guaranteed. In addition to private supervision, this also requires good public supervision. The biofuel production chain is international, so supervision must be geared to it. Previously, cross-border fraud was detected from the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom. The coalition consists of five countries in which together the majority of European biofuel is produced. Its realization is an initiative of the Netherlands.

“The market is growing, so supervision has to grow with it. In this way we guarantee the sustainability of the biofuels we use. And that is important. Not only for the climate, but also for the investment security of companies in the sector. We are now joining forces, because we cannot do this without European cooperation. ”

Stronger legislation and more ambition

The five countries are calling on Timmermans and Simson to amend European legislation, so that the member states have a stronger basis to improve private and public supervision of the biofuel chain and that the same happens everywhere. They also call for more ambition in the current development of a European database in order to achieve as much transparency in the chain as possible. This makes it easy to check the reliability of sustainability claims.

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The biofuel production chain is spread over different countries. Countries therefore also exchange signals and methods among themselves. They can also take steps at national level to prevent fraud. In the Netherlands, the House of Representatives is voting today on a bill by State Secretary Van Veldhoven to strengthen national public supervision, according to the National government.

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