Photo courtesy Oregon Department of Agriculture.
Citing the damage that corn-based ethanol does to automobile engines, among other reasons, two U.S. senators have introduced legislation aimed at reducing the amount of corn ethanol in modern gasoline blends and replacing it with other forms of ethanol.
Last week, senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania introduced the Corn Ethanol Mandate Elimination Act of 2015 – technically an amendment to the Keystone XL Pipeline Act – which calls for the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard to drop any requirement that ethanol be blended from corn.
“This bill is a simple and smart modification of the Renewable Fuel Standard program,” Feinstein said in a statement. “Once we remove the corn ethanol mandate, the RFS program can finally serve its intended purpose: to support the development of advanced, environmentally friendly biofuels like biodiesel, cellulosic ethanol and other revolutionary fuels.”
While the Renewable Fuel Standard does not currently stipulate that corn be used to create the ethanol blended into gasoline (it only mandates four categories: cellulosic biofuel, biomass-based diesel, advanced biofuel, and renewable fuel), it does explicitly permit corn as one of several materials – including sugarcane, crop residue, switchgrass, and grain sorghum – that can be used to create ethanol.
In introducing the amendment, Feinstein pointed to a number of reasons why corn shouldn’t be used for fuel, including the so-called “blend wall” – that is, the inability of U.S. oil refiners to add any more ethanol to the U.S. fuel supply. In the last couple of years, refiners have come up against the blend wall due to both decreased demand for gasoline overall and decreased demand for higher ethanol content blends such as E15 and E85 (both compared to the EPA’s projections). Though ethanol supporters have argued against the existence of a blend wall, the EPA, in November 2013, for the first time proposed to reduce the amount of ethanol it expects refiners to add to the U.S. fuel supply – from 16.55 billion gallons in 2013 to 15.21 billion gallons in 2014. The EPA has yet to finalize that proposal,s and late last year announced that it wouldn’t do so until early this year.
Feinstein, in her introduction of the amendment, noted that the current oil refinery infrastructure can only handle 13.5 billion gallons of ethanol and cited an EPA document in which the agency stated that it “does not currently foresee a scenario in which the market could consume enough ethanol” to meet the amounts stated.
The amendment has already received criticism, most notably from the Renewable Fuels Association, which took issue largely with Feinstein and Toomey’s assertion that the corn ethanol mandate drives up the prices of food. “This amendment is an unnecessary solution to an imaginary problem. If approved, it would set our nation’s energy, economic, and climate agenda back decades.”
Feinstein and other U.S. legislators have previously tried to introduce similar acts, including the Corn Ethanol Mandate Elimination Act of 2013, a stand-alone bill that died in committee; and the Phantom Fuels Elimination Act of 2014, another stand-alone bill that also died in committee. In addition, a House of Representatives resolution introduced earlier this month calls for the EPA to make a comprehensive assessment of the effects ethanol-blended gasoline has on automobile and other engines; it has been referred to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and to the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Both the AACA and SEMA have stated their opposition to ethanol in fuel in the past. On SEMA’s 2015 priorities list, the organization notes that it plans to campaign for the ban of E15 ethanol-blended gasoline and ask Congress to reform the biofuel mandates in the RFS.
The Keystone XL Pipeline Act, which passed the House 266-153 on January 9, is currently under debate on the Senate floor.
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