Three dozen senators sent a letter to the EPA asking for a much higher mandate for biodiesel than the agency proposed for 2016 and 2017. They say the agency failed to “adequately recognize the domestic biodiesel industry’s production capacity and its ability to increase production.” The EPA would set biodiesel’s share of the fuel market at 1.9 billion gallons in 2017. The senators say the industry produced 1.3 billion gallons in 2013, so “we believe increases to at least 2 billion gallons in 2016 and 2.3 billion gallons in 2017 would be reasonable and prudent.”
Among the senators signing the letter were Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president; Agriculture Committee chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas; Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois; and John Thune of South Dakota, who’s No. 4 in the GOP Senate leadership. The EPA is accepting comments on its proposals for the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) until next Monday and will finalize them later this year.
Tom Buis of the ethanol trade group Growth Energy called for the EPA to give a larger role to ethanol in the fuel market. “The RFS is the only policy to ever have loosened the oil industry’s stranglehold on the liquid fuels marketplace and the only policy that will help us kick our dangerous addiction to foreign oil,” writes Buis in a column in Ethanol Producer magazine. The EPA has proposed a lower mandate for corn-based ethanol for 2015 and 2016 than what was authorized by law. The combined corn ethanol mandate for the two years would be 9 percent lower than originally planned.