Case Studies

Case Study 2 - TRACERCO™ Taggants enable government to implement biodiesel strategy

A government had developed an aggressive biofuels policy and in particular a rapid biodiesel implementation strategy to enable it to reduce its long term dependency on petroleum and also create jobs and wealth in the rural community.

The strategy, coordinated with the fuel and motor vehicle industry, involved setting initially an upper limit on the amount of biodiesel to be blended with petroleum diesel (maximum 2% biodiesel in petroleum diesel). This upper limit would then be replaced by a mandatory 2% of biodiesel in diesel by 2008, rising to 5% by 2013. This strategy allows both the fuel and motor vehicle industry to successfully adapt to the new biodiesel fuel entering into the market, whilst enabling the fledgling biodiesel industry to take a foothold in the overall fuel market.

Alongside this blend strategy, the government implemented taxation subsidies to enable biodiesel producers to compete with petroleum based diesel, this included different taxation rates depending on the origin of oilseed used to produce the biodiesel, the location of the oilseed production and the type of organisation producing the bidiesel.

One key aspect of the implementation strategy was for the government to test diesel in the consumer supply chain to ensure that it didn’t go above the 2% limit initially (and allow it to ensure it was at the 2% level by 2008).

The government also wanted the ability to track the biodiesel in the supply chain back to the producer, thus ensuring quality control and subsidies were being adopted correctly.

This national scale programme required Tracerco to develop a large number of unique TRACERCO™ Taggants so that each producer had their own discrete tracer. These TRACERCO™ Taggants are highly stable both in biodiesel and petroleum diesel and have no impact on the fuel’s legitimate use.

The scale of the biodiesel tagging programme is huge with estimates currently indicating that by 2010, over 2.4 billion litres of biodiesel will require tagging.

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