Advanced BioFuels USA

by Lisa Gibson (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  During a meeting with three attendees of the American Coalition for Ethanol’s 2019 Washington, D.C., fly-in, Jaqueline Schmitz, senior policy advisor for Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said New Jersey voters are against ethanol. They don’t like the emissions and they don’t want to use it in their boat engines, she said. 

The three attendees, together constituting team No. 21 of about 25 fly-in teams in Capitol Hill meetings that afternoon, referred her to a greenhouse gas emissions chart they carried along, showing that emissions from ethanol continue to decline, currently hovering at about 40 percent below that of gasoline. And boat engines? The crappie masters tournament uses E10 every year.

The annual ACE Fly-In & Government Affairs Summit took place April 2 and 3, and education became a prominent theme, attendees said. Many legislators, particularly from states with little agriculture, were unaware of the details of the Renewable Fuel Standard and had limited knowledge of ethanol. Many thought the RFS will only be around a few more years, didn’t understand renewable identification numbers or were under the impression that E15 has higher emissions than E10.

Conversely, other legislators and their staffs were well-versed on the issues fly-in attendees wanted to discuss and already had letters or petitions in progress to help. 

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Scott McPheeters, board member of Kaapa Ethanol, with two locations in Nebraska, and a corn farmer, said he attends the ACE fly-in every year. “The first time I went, I saw the value of what was happening and how well-organized it was, and I felt really good about accomplishing something,” he said. “We’re frustrated. We wonder what we can do, and it’s a great feeling to go and actually talk to people.” 

The meetings with legislators and staffers who have no opinion on ethanol can be the most interesting and constructive, he said. “Those are the ones that are really nice because you can go in and present the facts. They’ve been believing what they’ve heard and what they’ve heard is spun by the oil industry.” 

McPheeters grows only food-grade corn, sold to Frito Lay. But the ethanol industry represents a benefit for all corn farmers, he said. “It’s all a big picture. You don’t have to sell corn to an ethanol plant to benefit from the market generated by the ethanol plant.”

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Many attendees agreed that leaning on the climate change impacts of ethanol was a successful tactic in their meetings. It was nice to go on offense instead of playing defense, some said.

Dave Sovereign, chairman of the board for Golden Grain Energy in Mason City, Iowa, vice president of the ACE board and president of fuel retailer Cresco Fuels in Cresco, Iowa, said it’s important to tailor the message to the legislator or staffer in the meeting. He was surprised to find out that many don’t even own cars, let alone worry about what fuel they’re using.

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Many attendees get phone calls and emails from legislative staff long after the event, asking about ethanol-related topics, Jennings (Brian Jennings, CEO of ACE) added.

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Perhaps the most critical issue this year was the damage SREs have done to the ethanol industry. In 2016 and 2017, 54 waivers were granted, totaling more than 2.6 billion gallons. A lack of reallocation is oversupplying a tender ethanol market. 

“We’re always working on something [at fly-ins], but this is really critical,” McPheeters said. 
“The real and acute economic pain in rural America is caused, in part, by EPA’s abuse of the SRE provision of the RFS and ongoing trade disputes,” Jennings said. “It was evident on the faces of (and in the words of) many of the farmers in attendance that their patience is running incredibly thin and they are concerned about being able to hang on given the onslaught of demand destruction.”

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SREs likely will need to be addressed through a lawsuit, he added. ACE is involved in a lawsuit in the 10th Circuit to challenge three specific SREs granted to HollyFrontier Corp. and CVR Energy. It has also petitioned EPA to reallocate SREs. “That’s something that we could take up here in D.C., in the D.C. circuit,” Jennings said.   READ MORE

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