Quality assurance for biodiesel at filling stations stopped

Tax policy forces biodiesel filling station operators to give up

Germany has been world champion in the number of filling stations selling biodiesel as B100 for many years. No other country had more filling pumps for pure biodiesel than Germany. The Arbeitsgemeinschaft Qualitätsmanagement Biodiesel e. V. (AGQM) assumes that the number of filling stations selling biodiesel until last year amounted to about 1,900 in this country.

The times at which one in nine filling stations sold vegetable oil based fuel have gone by, however. A poll by AGQM among its 437 licensees has shown that merely 88 firms are still interested in selling biodiesel. Of 1,200 filling stations operated by the licensees, only about 250 stations are left. As AGQM and other industry associations see it, this negative development is due to the disproportionately high taxation on biodiesel. As a consequence of the dramatic drop in the number of filling stations and the sale by the remaining stations, the executive committee of AGQM decided last week to discontinue the quality assurance at the level of biodiesel filling stations. The quality management at the level of the biodiesel producers and traders, members of AGQM, who supply biodiesel for obligatory admixture to conventional diesel fuel and to wholesale businesses will remain in effect, however. To ensure the sale of biodiesel as fuel in its own right on a continuing basis, the AGQM calls upon the law-makers to define framework conditions that ensure the long-term competitiveness of biodiesel with mineral diesel.