Last week, Chairman of the US House Committee on Agriculture, Collin Peterson, together with Representatives Dusty Johnson, Dave Loebsack, Rodney Davis and Roger Marshall introduced the bipartisan Renewable Fuel Standard Integrity Act of 2019. The legislation aims to bring transparency to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) small refinery exemption (SRE) programme under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).
The bill will also set a deadline for refineries to submit petitions for RFS exemptions of 1 June to ensure that any waivers granted are ‘prospectively reallocated to non-exempt obligated parties, as well as require that key information surrounding the SREs is publicly available’, according to a statement from the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE).
“ACE thanks Chairman Peterson and Rep. Johnson for bipartisan legislation to correct EPA’s brazen mismanagement of the RFS small refinery exemption provision,” said ACE CEO Brian Jennings. “Under President Trump, EPA has retroactively granted more than 50 so-called hardship waivers for small refineries, erasing 2.61 billion gallons worth of the RFS blending obligations for 2016 and 2017 compliance years, and has 39 more requests pending for 2018. More>>