MOSCOW (MRC) -- France has allowed a limited use of palm oil at Total’s new La Mede biofuel refinery, a move that prompted an outcry from French farmers who said most of the palm oil would be imported, reported Reuters.
The environment ministry said in a statement that Total’s newly granted permit for the refinery specified that at least 25 percent of feedstock used to make the biofuel should come from recycled oil. The rest would come from crude vegetable oils, including palm oil.
Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot, a fierce opponent of palm oil use because it is linked to deforestation, also asked that Total use oils meeting sustainability criteria fixed by the European Commission to protect biodiversity and the environment, the ministry said.
French oilseed producers, whose products are used to make biodiesel in France, strongly condemned the decision to allow the use of mostly imported palm oil, which they stressed was also a big component of recycled oils.
"This decision is incomprehensible. Besides its ecological nonsense, it is a slap in the face of our industry," Arnaud Rousseau, head of French Oilseed Producers (FOP) group, said in a statement.
Total said in 2015 it would halt crude refining at the loss-making La Mede site near Marseille and invest 200 million euros (USD236 million) there to create a biorefinery set to produce 500,000 tonnes of biodiesel per year.
French farmers and environmental activists have expressed strong concerns since then that Total would mainly turn to palm oil, accused of causing deforestation and unfair competition against local vegetable oil, to supply the refinery.
Total committed in a statement to use less than 300,000 tonnes of crude palm oil per year at La Mede out of a total processing capacity of 650,000 tonnes, and to use oils from other plants such as rapeseed, sunflower seed and maize (corn).
As MRC wrote before, in December 2017, Total inaugurated the new units at its Antwerp integrated refining & petrochemicals platform, which haв progressively started up in the past few months of 2017.
Total S.A. is a French multinational oil and gas company and one of the six "Supermajor" oil companies in the world with business in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Asia. The company's petrochemical products cover two main groups: base chemicals and the consumer polymers (polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene) that are derived from them.
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