Cellulosic Ethanol Will Get Back Up

March 22, 2016

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(RPA News) Our top story this month is a blunt reminder of how deeply U.S. policy uncertainty cut down and yanked back the progress of commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol over the past few years. The U.S. EPA’s epic indecision and sometimes indifference toward the law that is the renewable fuel standard (RFS), no doubt, seriously impeded the sector’s historic advancement. What’s more, it frightened away investors and contributed to the withdrawal of promising, well-funded efforts. In the words of Brooke Coleman, executive director of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council, getting the RFS administered properly, fixing the bias in the federal tax code and continuing to expand the market for ethanol blends—doing all of that now—could bring back investors, but it’s a long road back.

This month, we also hear from Brent Erickson, executive vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. He, too, believes that stimulating investment in advanced and cellulosic ethanol starts with the federal government righting its biofuels ship and taking action to reverse the damage that’s been done. In fact, BIO estimates that the U.S. EPA’s delays in issuing its renewable volume obligation numbers, the famously delayed RFS blending rules, caused a $13.7 billion shortfall in the investment necessary to build cellulosic and advanced ethanol capacity. “While the first-of-a-kind cellulosic plants were being completed, new plants should have been started or planned—there were some, but too few,” he tells us. READ MORE and MORE (Ethanol Producer Magazine)