Certas Energy invests £1.5 million to expand HVO refuelling network

Certas Energy on May 14 reopened its Alconbury bunker in Cambridgeshire after a £500,000 refurbishment, the first of five HGV refuelling sites in a £1.5 million HVO rollout. The company said the wider programme will run over the next 12 months and is aimed at making hydrotreated vegetable oil a more practical fleet fuel, not just a decarbonisation pledge.

The Alconbury upgrade included new pumps, pipework, card readers, security systems and improved facilities. Certas has framed the bunker network as the point where HVO adoption either becomes routine or stalls, because fleet operators need fast turnaround, fuel security and predictable access as much as they need lower-carbon credentials. That is especially true for construction, quarrying and materials-handling fleets, where vehicles are time-sensitive and route patterns are fixed around refuelling locations.

The investment also lands in a UK market where infrastructure still does more work than fuel chemistry. The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation encourages the supply of low-carbon fuels for road vehicles, trains, non-road transport and mobile machinery, and a ministerial answer in April 2026 said renewable fuels supplied under the RTFO currently account for a third of the savings needed for the UK transport carbon budget. For road fuel, HVO also sits at the standard VAT rate, which leaves the economics tied closely to site access, haul length and depot convenience.

Certas said the new five-site programme builds on a separate 2025 expansion that took its HVO storage and supply depot network from six sites to 28 nationwide after additions in Whitby, Fort William, Porthmadog, Braintree and Sheffield. The company said that programme added about 1 million litres of HVO to the network and enabled another 1 million litres of HVO use in its own operating fleet. Certas said its own switch to HVO delivered 6,433 tonnes of CO2 savings in two years and helped cut Scope 1 emissions by 24% in FY22, three years ahead of a 2025 target.

The scale is still modest against the wider UK road-freight market, but the direction is clear. Certas said it expects more than 4 million litres of renewable HVO to be used annually in its own fleet, while its membership of Zemo Partnership’s Renewable Fuels Assurance Scheme is aimed at giving commercial vehicle operators independent verification of fuel provenance and greenhouse-gas savings. The company has also used fleet trials to build confidence, including work with the AA, which expanded its HVO trial from three vehicles to 15 to test roadside-recovery performance in real operating conditions.