60 Groups Urge Trump to Restore Volumes Lost to SREs

In the ongoing battle for the reallocation of lost blend volumes exempted under small refinery waivers to large refiners, 60 agriculture and biofuel groups sent a letter to President Trump urging him to "fix" the Administrations' EPA’s proposed rulemaking for reallocating future small refinery exemptions (SREs).

The coalition stresses that the primary problem with the proposed rulemaking is that it proposes to recover only the gallons previously recommended for exemption by the Department of Energy, rather than the volume of actual waived gallons. “This one modification converts a commitment to fully account for SREs into a bureaucratically uncertain path that recovers only one fraction of those gallons lost to SREs and could results in the RFS backsliding in 2020.”

Since 2017, small refinery waivers have removed billions of gallons from annual biofuels blending mandates under the RFS program. The waivers play a large role in preventing a de facto E15 mandate by keeping volumetric blending requirements more closely aligned with actual consumer demand.

From PMAA