Trump to modestly boost 2019 biofuel mandate in gasoline
The Trump administration ordered oil companies to blend more renewable fuel into gasoline and diesel next year — but it could be the last increase for years to come, as the government starts to make sweeping changes to the U.S. biofuel mandate.
With the final 2019 quotas released Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency is kicking off a head-to-toe overhaul of the Renewable Fuel Standard and setting off a fresh battle between the oil industry and agricultural interests over U.S. gasoline market share that will play out against an increasingly political backdrop.
Refiners and some environmentalists will be pressuring the EPA to dial back the 13-year-old biofuel mandate next year, even as President Donald Trump courts voters in the top corn- and ethanol-producing state of Iowa.
Trump easily won Iowa in 2016’s presidential election after pledging to back ethanol. But in November’s midterms, with soybeans in the crosshairs of the U.S.-China trade war, Democrats flipped two Republican-held House seats and now hold three of the state’s four congressional districts.
The so-called RFS reset will take place “right in the middle of political mischief season,” said Stephen Brown, an oil industry consultant and former Andeavor Corp. lobbyist. The effort will be complicated by its “juxtaposition with the Iowa caucuses in January 2020, and genuflection at the altar of corn before then.”
The EPA on Friday said it’s requiring refiners to blend 19.92 billion gallons of biofuel next year, a 3.3 percent increase over the current requirements and largely in line with quotas the agency proposed in June. Some 15 billion gallons of the total can come from conventional sources such as