The annual volume produced in Rotterdam will be enough for more than half a million cars to run continuously on pure NExBTL. The emission benefits of the refinery’s output will be equivalent of removing more than a quarter of a million cars from the roads. This means reducing greenhouse gases by a total of more than 1.5 million tons annually. Like Neste Oil’s three other NExBTL plants, the refinery in Rotterdam is ISCC-certified and capable of producing also renewable aviation fuel in the future.

The facility is capable of using Neste Oil’s wide feedstock base consisting of a variety of vegetable oils, by-products of vegetable oil refining (e.g. stearin), as well as waste oils and fats which all meet the sustainability criteria included in the EU Renewable Energy Directive.

The Rotterdam refinery is also capable of utilizing future feedstocks such as algae oil. As a corporate partner in a five-year AlgaePARC project launched in June 2011 and coordinated by Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands, Neste Oil is involved in developing technologies and processes for growing microalgae on an industrial scale as a raw material for use in fuel, food, and chemical production.

Last week, Neste Oil also announced that it will build a pilot plant to produce waste-based microbial oil at its Porvoo refinery. (Earlier post.) It will be the first pilot plant in Europe designed to produce microbial oil for use in manufacturing renewable fuel from waste-based raw materials.

Neste Oil has a similar-sized facility in Singapore that was completed towards the end of 2010. Furthermore, the company operates two renewable diesel plants at the Porvoo refinery in Finland that came on stream in 2007 and 2009 with a combined capacity of 380,000 metric tons per year.

With the start-up of the Rotterdam refinery, the production capacity of Neste Oil’s renewable diesel refineries totals approximately 2 million metric tons annually which strengthens the company’s position as the world’s leading renewable diesel producer, and helps meet the world’s growing energy needs with low-emission renewable fuel. The main target markets for NExBTL are in Europe and North America.