The EPA announced yesterday that it had granted five additional small refinery exemptions (SREs) for 2017, reducing the number of pending petitions in the queue for that year as of 1 March from seven to two. This brings the total number of exemptions to 9.4 percent of the 19.28 billion gallons in overall biofuel required volume obligations under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). After a company submits a petition to the EPA, the exemption is granted if the agency determines that complying with the RFS would create "disproportionate economic hardship." Small refineries are defined as producing no more than 75,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude in 2006 and an average aggregate daily throughput of the same limit in the most recent full calen...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...