Oil Refiners and Biofuels: 2012 to Feature Fight over RFS, Cooperation on RIN Fraud
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) …In Florida, the National Biodiesel Conference — biodiesel’s grandest show — opened with exuberance over 2011 results, and resolve to meet the industry’s two major issues in 2012, defense of the Renewable Fuel Standard, and a crack-down on phony biodiesel credits sold to obligated parties by con artists posing as legitimate biodiesel producers.
“The RFS works,” glowed National Biodiesel Board CEO Joe Jobe, in marking the industry’s first billion-gallon production year in 2011, as industry benefitted from a now-expired $1.00 per gallon biodiesel tax credit, and from the billion gallon mandate called for under the Renewable Fuel Standard.
…“It’s a fantasy to think that global energy prices are based on a free market; they are controlled and manipulated by a cartel,” Jobe said.
…Just now, the EPA has thrown out another 48.1 million fake biodiesel credits, this time sold by Absolute Fuels in Texas. It follows on last year’s scandal when Clean Green Fuels of Maryland had 32.3 million credits declared invalid. Neither company had produced biodiesel equivalent to the credits they pretended to have sold.
The refining industry is up in arms. The EPA has demanded that they pay fines for submitting fake RINs, and also buy new, real ones; and, the agency said that the obligated parties would have to recover the money paid out for fraudulent RINs by their own legal action against the sellers. READ MORE and MORE (PJStar.com)
