OPINION The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued proposed regulatory changes related to required pump labeling and infrastructure compatibility for E15. This is a long-awaited proposal and gives stakeholders, including
Renewed focus on climate legislation could help biofuels
The biofuel industry argues that President-elect Joe Biden can also make progress on his climate goals by expanding biofuel usage mandates, embracing a low carbon fuel policy and increasing vehicle emissions standards. 5:30 am, Jan. 17, 2021 ×
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Now that Democrats have won control of the Senate, climate legislation is inevitable, and farm groups have to get involved in the debate, says Chandler Goule, CEO of the National Association of Wheat Growers and a former Democratic congressional staffer.
“We’ve got to make sure that agriculture is part of the solution, Goule said in a Washington Week in Review interview with Agri-Pulse. It’s not if climate legislation is coming, it’s when. So we might as well just get over whether this is going to happen or not,”
by Erin Voegele (Biomass Magazine) Members of the House Biofuels Caucus sent a letter to President Trump on Jan. 12 urging him to direct the U.S. EPA to immediately reject any pending small refinery exemption (SRE) requests that do not meet criteria established by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its January 2020 ruling on SREs.
In the letter, the representatives say they are alarmed by reports that the EPA may issue numerous pending 2019 SREs despite ongoing legal action and commitments from top EPA officials that this would not occur.
“These illegal small refinery exemptions are contrary to legislative intent and hurt our rural economies; they also impede the use of clean, renewable liquid fuel in the marketplace,” they wrote. “This news arrives at the worst time possible as the biofuels industry continues to reel from the economic impacts caused by the COVID19 pandemic. These exemptions, coming on top of 85 waivers already granted by EPA over the past four years, w
The country’s leading lobbying arm for oil refiners doesn’t want President-elect Joe Biden to rule out working with its members on policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Small oil refineries would have an additional six months to show they had complied with their obligations to mix corn ethanol into gasoline during 2019 under an EPA proposal published on Thursday.