Ten years and 33 million tons later – Happy Birthday Neste

A decade ago, the production of renewable diesel began at the Neste Porvoo refinery in Finland. Since then, Neste’s renewable biofuels have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from traffic by more than 33 million tons. That figure is close to the total annual CHG emissions from road transport in both Sweden and Finland combined.

Neste’s MY Renewable Diesel has been used in a number of applications as a way to reduce emissions, ranging from private cars to heavy transport and buses, from entire city transport infrastructures to sporting and entertainment events.

"Our Neste MY Renewable Diesel has provided our customers with a quick and easy way to significantly reduce their carbon footprint. Thanks to the product's high quality, it can be used in existing engines to achieve up to 90% smaller GHG emissions compared to fossil diesel. I am extremely happy to see that an increasing number of drivers, businesses, cities and event organizers want to choose this low-emission renewable fuel," says Kaisa Hietala, Executive Vice President, Renewable Products at Neste. 

The company has now become the ‘world’s largest’ producer of renewable diesel from waste and residues, its production capacity improving from 0.2 to 2.6 million tons in 10 years. Neste now has refineries in Rotterdam and Singapore, as well as Finland, and is striving to hit 3 million tons production capacity by 2020.

Throughout its decade of existence, the company has been at the forefront of developments in the biofuels industry. “While we were making the first investment decisions on the production of renewable diesel here in Porvoo, we started to review how the range of raw materials could be expanded. Regarding waste and residues, we mainly used animal waste fat and vegetable oil at first, but at that time already we commenced research on the use of used cooking oil, algae oil and microbes," summarises Lars Peter Lindfors, senior vice president, Technology at Neste.

"What someone calls waste is a valuable raw material for us. We are producing Neste MY Renewable Diesel from various types of industrial waste and residues, such as waste fat from the meat processing industry and used cooking oil. We are also constantly studying other, increasingly lower-quality raw materials that have no other significant uses and that could otherwise be burned as energy,"