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Bloomberg
The Trump administration is slated to unveil biofuel policy changes, including efforts to tamp down costs for refiners while broadening the market for ethanol, according to people familiar with the action.
The announcement follows weeks of negotiations by the Agriculture Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department to flesh out a tentative deal struck at the White House last month, said the people, who requested anon-ymity to discuss the matter.
The White House-brokered compromise aimed to offer something to eve-ry major stakeholder in the contentious debate over the US biofuel mandate, including refiners forced to use corn-based ethanol and farm-state lawmakers who want to guarantee demand for the product. Under the 13-year-old Renewable Fuel Standard, refiners are required to use biofuel, often corn-based ethanol.
The contours of the compromise remained in dispute, and a White House memo meant to clarify the agreed-upon changes was delayed as regulators worked to turn the deal into specific regulatory proposals. The announcement by the White House may, in effect, be the delayed memo, one of the people said. Refiners’ concerns generally center around the cost of compliance credits known as renewable identification numbers, or RINs, they use to prove they have satisfied annual biofuel quotas. Ethanol advocates, including Iowa’s Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, have argued that the EPA is undercutting annual biofuel quotas by more liberally exempting refineries from the mandates in response to a federal court ruling last year.