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40 percent of biodiesel now quality-certified
By John Baxter
Seventeen major biodiesel producers, representing 40 percent of the market, are now certified as meeting the National Biodiesel Board’s BQ9000 quality standard, its top accreditation officer said.
“BQ9000 is a voluntary program,” Leland Tong, chair of the National Biodiesel Accreditation Commission, told attendees at the National Biodiesel Conference in San Antonio. “It’s very rigorous, and people have to sign up for it. It will continue for perpetuity, and it has made strong headway in our industry.”
The best preventive strategy for truckers against bad biodiesel is to buy only BQ9000-certified fuel, said Bob McCormick, principal engineer of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Once substandard fuel has gotten into your tanks, eliminating fuel-related problems can be difficult, McCormick said.
The BQ9000 standard is one of a number of “aggressive steps to improve quality” undertaken by the National Biodiesel Board, said Joe Jobe, the board’s CEO. “It’s all about credibility in the product and the industry.”
The standard, open to any producer or marketer, involves careful recordkeeping and repeated testing of every batch of fuel made, stored and shipped, Tong said.
Acknowledging that the costly process “can be disadvantageous to smaller producers,” Tong noted that the National Biodiesel Board had “levied dues at half the maximum level for smaller producers to encourage them to participate.” The board also encourages producers to test the fuel at in-house labs to save time and money, Tong said.
The board also encourages the states, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to enforce biodiesel fuel quality, Tong said.
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