At bp Castellón, import duty classification on bio-feedstocks represents a significant and recoverable cost.
The refinery uses biowaste-derived feedstocks — used cooking oil (UCO), soybean expeller oil (SBEO), and palm oil mill effluent (POME) — as inputs for HVO and SAF production. Under Spanish customs authority classification, each of these materials carries an import duty of between 2% and 7.7%. At commercial production volumes, those rates add up to a significant recurring cost that directly affects the viability of the biofuels programme.
A pathway exists to mitigate these costs.
The RPA regime (Régimen de Perfeccionamiento Activo, or Inward Processing) allows import duties on feedstock to be deferred and applied to the finished product instead. For HVO and SAF, the finished product duty rate is 0%. Qualifying for RPA can be a challenge though, as it requires a full, auditable traceability of bio-feedstock from import, processing, to finished product.
That is the hurdle Maron Systems was brought in to help with.

What the Refinery Already Had
bp Castellón wasn’t starting from scratch. Maron OAS was already adopted across several departments as the site’s primary oil accounting tool, handling fence-line movement quantities, inventory records, and the monthly site-wide balance and loss calculations. The daily reconciliation work meant the underlying data was already being captured in the system:
- Imports recorded at the individual tank level
- Bio-feedstock tank compositions maintained
- Internal movements tracked from feedstock tanks to process units
- Production movements into finished product tanks
The data existed. The missing connection was a link across the full chain, presented in a way that customs authorities would accept.
What Was Built
A FIFO-based tracking algorithm was developed within OAS to track feedstock consumption in the order each shipment arrives. Bio-feedstocks and products derived from them are typically blended, which makes proving origin through physical testing almost impossible. This is why the model is accounting-based rather than molecular.
As feedstock enters a process unit, the system attributes that consumption to the earliest outstanding import batch first, working forward chronologically. The corresponding production output of HVO or SAF is then associated with those specific feedstock inputs.
The result is a traceable chain from a specific import of cargo, through its proportional consumption in processing, to its contribution to a finished product volume. This traceability layer was designed to integrate within the daily OAS workflow bp Castellón already operates.
From that chain, OAS generates reports documenting individual feedstock imports and their proportional contribution to finished product volumes. These reports are designed to form the documentary basis of an RPA submission to Spanish customs authorities.
The core traceability capability is in place. Following changes to operational processes on site, the OAS configuration requires updating to reflect how the refinery currently runs. That work is scoped and the RPA application remains the commercial objective.

Why This Matters for the Industry
The biofuels sector is under growing pressure to prove the origin of feedstock materials, whether it’s for regulatory compliance or commercial credibility. As governments tighten the criteria for what qualifies as sustainable aviation fuel or renewable diesel, the ability to trace a specific cargo through the full production cycle is now a baseline expectation instead of a differentiator.
Compliance is not the only driver. With refining margins under pressure and current market volatility, the ability to recover mitigatable trade levies is a meaningful lever.
The underlying data may exist within refinery systems. What has been missing is the layer that consolidates and processes the data in a way regulators can recognize.
The collaboration with bp Castellón shows how existing OAS infrastructure can be extended to meet that requirement, without building an entirely separate system or creating a data burden for operations teams.
While the RPA application is specific to Spain, the traceability model applies wherever import duty regimes create an incentive to account for feedstock consumption at the shipment level. Refineries processing bio-feedstocks across Europe are dealing with variations of this same challenge. For sites already running OAS, the data infrastructure to pursue RPA or an equivalent is already in place. The traceability layer Maron built at bp Castellón is the model for how to use it.
What This Means for Your Refinery
The collaboration with bp Castellón is a starting point. Refineries at different stages of their biofuels programmes will have different configuration requirements, and projects like this rarely follow a linear trajectory.
Rather than delivering a fixed solution, Maron works alongside refineries as those demands develop, reconfiguring OAS to stay aligned with what is happening in real-time. The value reflected is a system that keeps pace with the workflow, instead of one that has to be replaced when it changes.
If duty recovery is on your agenda, the infrastructure to pursue it may already be closer than you think. Get in touch with the Maron team at sales@maronsystems.co.uk to learn more.
