For the past 2 years the ethanol industry has hounded EPA about its use of small refinery exemptions (SREs), calling the increase in exempted volumes in recent years illegal. Apparently, the American Petroleum Institute (API) agrees. In comments filedlate last week on EPA’s proposed supplement rule to offset the SREs, API said it opposes the offset and that the “underlying legal flaw is EPA's drastic and unlawful expansion of [SREs]." Under a supplemental proposal for the 2020 volumes issued in October, EPA is considering adjusting the blending rates for biofuels to make up for the impact of past – and future - SREs, proposing two formulas: • Assuming that future SREs would be equivalent to the average that DO...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.