The American Petroleum Institute (AP), the association of oil drilling, refining, and natural gas producing companies, joined this week in signing a letter to Congress backing a move to grant year-round use of E15. Other signatories to the letter included the Renewable Fuel Association (RFA), Growth Energy, National Association of Truck Stop Operators (NATSO), the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), and American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) among other producer groups. That is a major development and has segments of the industry from upstream production to downstream marketing aligned. The Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1990 set the standards for ethanol blending with regard to its volatility in evaporating measured by a metric...
What You Need to Know Today: Market attention is shifting toward Tuesday’s USDA WASDE report, with analysts anticipating a modest reduction in U.S. corn production estimates and an increase in soybean production. The report could provide fresh direction for grain markets as traders reass...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s forecasts call for physical U.S. soybean crushing margins to weaken over the next four months and average $4.44/bushel by late February, while CBOT futures margins should rise modestly to about $2.40/bushel. A key catalyst for this is the expectation that U.S...
The election is over – for the most part. Counting is still underway in some states, including Alaska, where a ranked-choice voting system is in place for the Senate race, and Mississippi, as well as in some House districts. But as of now, Democrats have secured at least 54 Senate seats,...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.