Workshop: Mass balance for renewable liquid and gaseous fuels

As sustainable fuels production advances globally and international trade surges, there is a growing need for a reliable and transparent system that keeps track of fuel exchanges and accounts for their sustainability characteristics. The mass balance approach has been brought forward to address this issue with regard to the verification of bioenergy sustainability. As a chain of custody solution, it has been designed to trace the flow of materials through complex value chains.

The mass balance approach increases flexibility for producers, traders, and consumers of renewable fuels and its sustainability attributes. However, understanding of mass balance varies across the globe, complicating the traceability of fuel volumes. With renewable fuel volumes being sold globally, this raises concerns on how to avoid that claims on sustainability characteristics are made double in different regions. In this workshop we explore how such concerns can be addressed and how mass balance can help to ramp up renewable fuel volumes in the market.

Madison Carroll, the Excutive Director of CoSAFA will share a perspective from the American SAF market. She will discuss what an ideal-type mass balance system could look like, what the role of regulatory bodies is in overseeing the mass balancing of fuels in the market, and what is currently in the way to make this happen?

Loek Verwijst, managing director at Peterson Projects GmbH will speak about the mass balance rules under the RED II from an auditor’s perspective. Loek has over 10 years in experience as ISCC auditor and certification manager at Control Union and currently specializes in helping companies implementing the changes of RED II and the Implementing Regulation at certified companies.

Finally,we will have a discussion among market players and regulators on the benefits of mass balance over other methodologies to prove sustainability characteristics. We will touch upon the implications of segregated fuel flows and physical testing of biogenic content and discuss issues relating mass balance, specific to the Dutch market.

We ask ourselves the question: In a landscape with increasing regulatory and third-party compliance programs, is there possibility for a government-recognised universal methodology on mass balance?

‍

About CoSAFA 


CoSAFA, the Council on Sustainable Aviation Fuels Accountability (read more), is a non-profit association with its Board of Directors representing the global aviation sector. CoSAFA has been developing a commonly understood and universally recognized procedure to decouple the environmental attributes of SAF from the physical product. The overall objective is to bring clarity and transparency to the SAF book and claim process.

About Peterson

Peterson is a service company (read more) that provides hands-on solutions to sustainability challenges supported by a team of experts in traceability and responsible sourcing areas. Peterson assists in defining sustainability policies, reducing environmental footprints and identifying potential sustainability claims, and defining them accordingly. In the bioenergy sector they support organizations in optimizing their GHG emission calculations and performance, and help them to acquire and maintain the relevant RED II certification, whilst optimizing business practices in the market.

‍