If you work in renewable fuels, you know the product. You may even work with it every day. But if someone asks you where the term “hydrogenation-derived renewable diesel” (HDRD) actually came from, there’s a reasonable chance you’d shrug and say it was always just… there.
It wasn’t. HDRD has a specific origin, and it is, almost entirely, a Canadian invention.
The Product Had Many Names
By the mid-2000s, the fuel now commonly called renewable diesel (RD) was already being produced commercially. Neste had its NExBTL. Honeywell UOP was marketing its Ecofining process. The European industry called it “hydrotreated vegetable oil” (HVO), a name that focused on the feedstock. The Americans, when they got around to it, would lean toward “hydrotreated esters and fatty acids” (HEFA), a process-oriented label that the aviation world adopted for its sustainable fuel pathways., a process-oriented label that the aviation world adopted for its sustainable fuel pathways.
None of these names quite did the job in a Canadian regulatory context. “Green diesel” wasn’t rigorous enough; “green” carries no clearly enforceable meaning in the regulatory context. “HVO” implies you’re only using vegetable oil, which isn’t always true. “HEFA” wasn’t yet in wide circulation. What regulators needed was a neutral, descriptive, legally defensible term that said exactly what the fuel was: diesel, derived from renewable feedstocks, via hydrogenation. They needed something that could sit in a regulation alongside “biodiesel” without ambiguity.
So they built one.
BC Gets There First
British Columbia passed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Renewable and Low Carbon Fuel Requirements) Act in 2008 and deposited the implementing regulation — B.C. Reg. 394/2008 — in December of that year, effective January 1, 2010. From day one, the regulation recognized “hydrogenation-derived renewable diesel” (HDRD) as eligible renewable content in the diesel pool. It showed up in the compliance reporting tables. It showed up in the GHGenius lifecycle model guidance. It was, in the fullest sense, a term of art embedded in law.
The federal government was still running demonstration projects at this point. The National Renewable Diesel Demonstration Initiative, launched in December 2008 – the same month BC deposited its regulation – was tasked with proving that RD could actually work under Canadian conditions before Ottawa would commit to requiring it. The federal Renewable Fuels Regulations weren’t published until September 2010, and the diesel requirement didn’t come into force until July 1, 2011, roughly 18 months after BC had already been tracking HDRD volumes in its compliance system.
By the time the federal government’s Natural Resources Canada commissioned its landmark Study of Hydrogenation Derived Renewable Diesel as a Renewable Fuel Option in North America, the term was already established. The study, produced by ÉcoRessources Consultants, used HDRD throughout, treating it as settled vocabulary rather than a new coinage.
A Name That Reflects Its Context
It’s worth appreciating why HDRD landed in Canada and not elsewhere. The term is, if nothing else, exhaustively precise. “Hydrogenation-derived” tells you the process, “renewable” tells you the feedstock origin, and “diesel” tells you the product class. There is no ambiguity, no trademark issue, and no implication about which specific feedstock was used. It is the kind of name that a regulator, rather than a marketer, would choose – which is exactly who chose it.
The rest of the world never fully adopted “HDRD” as a term. Under California’s LCFS, it’s just RD. In Europe, HVO remains dominant. In the U.S. aviation context, HEFA is the standard. Even in Canada, the industry has gradually shifted toward RD in commercial usage, and the federal Clean Fuel Regulations of 2022 use more flexible language than the volumetric mandates that preceded them.
But in BC compliance reports, in the GHGenius model documentation, and in the regulatory history of Canada’s early low carbon fuel policy, HDRD endures – a tidy piece of bureaucratic craftsmanship from a province that, characteristically, decided not to wait for Ottawa to figure it out first.
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