EPA’s latest move for ethanol blending requirements

EPA Administrator Michael Regan stands near the Marathon Petroleum Refinery as he conducts a television interview, while touring neighborhoods that abut the refinery, in Reserve, La., Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. Regan visited St. John and St. James parishes on a tour he called "Journey to Justice." The five-day trip from Mississippi to Texas in mid-November highlighted low-income, mostly minority communities adversely affected by decades of industrial pollution. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

 

The Biden administration moved this week to put up another roadblock to small refinery operators such as the Wynnewood Refinery in Oklahoma to obtain exemptions from the EPA’s annual production requirements for ethanol and other biofuels.

The Biden administration lowered the requirements to account for reduced demand as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and also moved to deny any requests by the CVR Refinery and other small oil refineries to be exempted from ethanol requirements.

It was those exemptions that proved to be basis of CVR’s Supreme Court challenge which resulted in a June 2021 ruling seen as a victory for oil companies seeking relief from the requirements.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices rejected arguments that the Environmental Protection Agency’s exemption power is limited to only a handful of refineries that have received uninterrupted annual waivers from the Renewable Fuel Standard.

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