The consumption of green fuels in Spain falls by 18% in five years: "There is a lack of political ambition and too much tax burden"

Paula María Madrid

Madrid

Updated Tuesday,16January2024 - 01:17

The energy sector is full of paradoxes. The fact that, in the midst of the green rush, the consumption of biofuels in Spain has plummeted in the last five years is one of them. This is the conclusion of the analysis carried out by the renewable energy employers' association Appa of the latest data from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Commission, on the contribution of clean energies to transport.

According to the conclusions released yesterday by Appa, the real weight of renewables as a transport energy source in the country has fallen by almost 18% between 2019 and 2022, from 1.7 to 1.4 million tonnes of oil equivalent (unit of measurement of energy known as toe).

But Spain's official statistics on the decarbonisation of transport, i.e. the figures accessible on the Eurostat portal in relation to the share of clean energy in national transport, do not reflect this drop. In fact, they show a marked upward trajectory of this indicator, going from 7.61% in 2019 to 9.68% in 2022.

Manuel Bustos, director of the Biofuels area at Appa, explains to EL MUNDO that this gap between the two graphs responds to an "accounting trick" protected by the European regulatory framework itself, which artificially fattens the state decarbonization statistics.

"Both the latest European directive on renewables, as well as its previous version, set multiples for the consumption of renewables in transport that raise the accounting weight of clean energy consumption well above the real consumption," he says. This model involves multiplying by certain parameters from the liters of biofuel consumed, to the electrical energy used in transport.

"With double counting, there are raw materials, such as used cooking oils or some animal fats (residual raw materials), that for accounting purposes would be worth twice as much, but for real purposes they would be less quantity, which would explain the decrease in real use. This double counting was introduced in 2018, hence the change in trend from that moment on," say business sources familiar with European regulations.

Appa's experts have undone this accounting operation to reverse the effect of these multipliers and find the real volumes of renewable energy in transport. The result of this analysis has been a second graph that is far from the previous one, the official one, because unlike the first one it does reflect the fall in the volume of biofuels that has stopped feeding cars, trucks, planes and ships in the last five years.

In detail, this regression has led to a decline in the real share of renewable energies in transport, which, from representing 4.19% in 2019, and after rising to 4.8% in a 2020 polluted by the effect of the pandemic, has been down for two years, standing at 4.23% in 2021 and 3.57% in 2022.

According to the official quota for the use of renewables for transport, and although two years late, Spain was very close to reaching the 2022% target set by the EU for 10 in 2020. But if we look at the graph of real consumption, once the aforementioned accounting operations have been dismantled, the country is still far behind that target, with a share of less than 4% at the end of last year. For Bustos, the reality is that Europe and Spain "have cheated on solitaire."

The fiscal burden

The renewable energy employers' association has already put on the table a shock plan with a series of measures designed to reverse this setback. The proposed actions include an increase in the targets for the use of renewable sources in transport to mitigate the bubble effect of these multipliers.

"Europe saw that model as an incentive, and on paper it is, but it didn't measure its impact on real biofuel consumption well. There has been a lack of political ambition and too much fiscal burden," Bustos sums up.

Years ago, Europe applied a zero rate for the organic part of each refuelling. If 10% of biofuel was diluted in each litre of petrol or diesel, as is the case today at many petrol stations, that percentage was exempt from the Special Tax on Hydrocarbons.

But the scenario changed in 2013. Since then, biofuels have been subject to the general rate of 21% VAT and the aforementioned excise duty to the same extent as other fossil fuels, i.e. without rebate. According to data handled by the main companies in the sector, the Treasury keeps around 307 euros per 1,000 liters of biodiesel, the same collection as in the case of diesel, in which the former is diluted. The equation is repeated in the case of bioethanol that is blended with gasoline.

"We have been proposing many of these measures for years, but it is now that their urgency is most evident. We have reviewed the figures and we have seen that the data for 2022 show that the consumption of biofuels is falling and not in a temporary way. That, in turn, is weighing down the real share of renewables in transport and, if renewables go down, fossil fuels go up," concludes the Appa spokesperson.