Biofuel industry pushes back against report findings | New RFS ad
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Doug Parker, the previous director of the EPA’s criminal investigation division and now president of the consultancy Earth and Water Strategies LLC, said the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program is vulnerable to scams that have bilked victims out of nearly $1 billion so far. Without changes, Parker warned, the RFS is “persistently open to large-scale, continuing misconduct” that undermines its green goals. Valero Energy Corp., the largest independent US oil refiner, commissioned Parker’s 13-page report as part of a lobbying campaign to convince lawmakers and the EPA to shift the burden for complying with the annual biofuel quotas away from refiners and importers to blenders who mix biodiesel and ethanol. Carl Icahn, the majority owner of CVR Energy Inc., also has complained about the status quo. The US government has prosecuted at least eight fraud cases concentrated on biodiesel, in which players lured by sometimes high RIN prices have sold fake credits and pretended to produce phantom fuel. The biofuels industry pushed back against Parker’s conclusions. Brooke Coleman, executive director of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council, said it is wrong to suggest it is hard to enforce or comply with the RFS. “It’s really quite simple. Blend renewable fuels or buy credits,” he said, according to Bloomberg. “This is all oil industry smoke and mirrors designed to make the federal government nervous about enforcing a program that is working.” There have been “a few isolated cases of RIN fraud in the biodiesel sector,” but that “has not been an issue at all with ethanol RINs,” said Geoff Cooper, senior vice president of the Renewable Fuels Association. Meanwhile, The Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) is rolling out a new advertising campaign aimed at undercutting support for proposes House legislation (HR 5180), which would cap the share of ethanol in the fuel supply at 9.7 percent. In 22 states ethanol already exceeds 10 percent of the fuel supply, the ad says.
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