One of the more entertaining spectacles in Washington these days is the industrial-policy competition between the climate and ethanol lobbies.
The Biden Administration this week handed both sides a victory, yet as usual neither is satisfied.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday finalized its long-awaited renewable fuel standards for 2023 to 2025. [emphasis, links added]
The standards dictate how much ethanol and other so-called biofuels must be blended into the nation’s fuel supply.
Refiners have to buy credits if they don’t meet quotas, which raises the price of gasoline.
Corn farmers, ethanol producers, and Iowa politicians are irate because the EPA didn’t increase the mandated volume for conventional renewable fuels.
“The rule is totally inconsistent with this administration’s climate agenda because everybody knows that both biodiesel and ethanol [are] environmentally positive,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said.
Actually, the ethanol mandate increases CO2 emissions as more land is diverted to growing crops for fuel.
A study last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted that the renewable fuel standard has led to “substantially greater GHG emissions” and “exacerbated other environmental problems,” including poor water quality and soil erosion.
But climate isn’t why the EPA decided not to increase the ethanol mandate.
Instead, EPA says projected gasoline demand is not expected “to recover to pre-pandemic levels, and moreover is expected to be lower by 2025 than it was in 2022.”
Lower gasoline consumption limits the amount of ethanol that can feasibly be blended into the fuel supply.
The ethanol lobby can blame electric-vehicle mandates and subsidies.
The Inflation Reduction Act included tax credits for biofuel production, but they aren’t as generous as the potpourri of subsidies for electric vehicles.
More EVs mean less demand for gas, which means less ethanol that can be blended.
The EPA tried to placate the ethanol lobby to little avail by shelving its earlier proposal to let EV makers qualify for renewable fuel credits, but this only infuriated the greens.
“This rule is an unfortunate example of politics setting environmental policy, not science or law, and a poor use of 60 million acres of American farmland,” Earthjustice declared.
That basically sums up the Administration’s climate policy, which is also driving the conversion of agricultural land into solar and wind farms.
The big losers in this industrial policy competition are American taxpayers.
h/t Steve B.
Read more at WSJ
The ethanol idiocity burns twice the fuel. One gallon of diesel makes about one gallon of ethanol. Burn the gallon once in the field and the processing; burn the new stuff in the cars and trucks. With the 30% reduction in energy density of ethanol, looks like we’re going backwards.
Rediculocity.
Idiocity.
Ineptocracy.
Your numbers are idiocy. One bushel of corn yields 2.7 US gallons of ethanol. Multiply by an average yield of 180 bushels per acre. That’s nearly 500 gallons of ethanol per acre of corn. Any farmer should be able to do that using 5 gallons of diesel, including trucking. Allow ethanol an energy density of half that of diesel and you get 250 gallons of diesel equivalent.
Corn ethanol production was not created to “green” the Earth. It was supposed to give farmers a new market for a crop that’s easy to over produce. (The green idea was part of the political sales pitch) In that regard, it’s a failure. We’re still over producing corn. Five billion bushels per year are diverted from the food chain.