The European Waste-based & Advanced Biofuels Association, representing 50-plus stakeholders from the EU waste-based and advanced biodiesel supply chain, announced Oct. 3 the start of a three-month pilot of the Union Database for Biofuels for its members under the guidance of Bioledger, a U.K. service provider.

Directive (EU) 2018/2001-REDII (Art 28.2) introduced the concept of a union database to enable the tracing of liquid and gaseous transport fuels that are eligible for being counted towards the Renewable Energy Directive targets.

Each Economic Operator along the entire supply chain will have to register all transactions of all relevant feedstocks, intermediate products and fuels, which can only occur between entities on the database.

Registration under the UDB should be compulsory for all EOs from Jan. 1, 2024, according to the European Commission.

“The UDB is expected to bring a significant boost to traceability and transparency across the biofuels supply chain,” said Angel Alvarez Alberdi, EWABA’s secretary general. “We initiated this pilot to help our members become entirely familiarized with UDB requirements and identify any issues that we could address with the European Commission ahead of the deadline. We are thrilled to launch this collective pilot aiming to facilitate a prompt and efficient rollout of the database.”

Patrick Lynch, CEO of Bioledger, added, “The Commission database has been built over the last four years of stakeholder consultation and is ready for testing. This pilot will give EWABA members relatively unique insight and time to prepare their operations and supply chains for a digital reporting system that is more appropriate to the scale and risk of the modern sustainable biofuel supply chain.”

EWABA is a Brussels-based association representing the interests of the European waste-based and advanced biofuels industry before EU institutions, national governments, industry, civil society and the media.

It promotes the inclusion of waste-based and advanced biofuels in the EU fuel mix as a sustainable means of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in EU transport.

EWABA-member Bioledger is an independent software provider spun out of the biofuels industry in response to demand from both regulators and industry for digital reporting tools that simplify compliance and improve traceability.

According to EWABA, Bioledger is the only service provider enabled to support automated transactions into the union database, as nominated by the voluntary schemes 2BS and RSB.

Bioledger’s mass-balance application for producers and traders and mobile app for first collectors is used by 49 companies in 26 countries representing more than 2 million metric tons of biofuel production per year.