Advanced BioFuels USA

Mr. Trump did lift a summertime ban on the use of E15, a blend of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline, drawing praise from corn growers. But his Environmental Protection Agency has also irked farmers by continuing to issue dozens of waivers to oil refineries that allow them to bypass legal requirements to blend in ethanol.

“The Trump administration’s ethanol policy has been defined by a failed attempt to placate both oil-and-gas and ethanol producers,” said Jeffrey T. Manuel, a historian at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and author of a coming book about ethanol politics. “The Trump administration held meetings last year to resolve the oil-versus-ethanol standoff, but they were inconclusive.”

Despite Mr. Trump’s characterization of ethanol as a partisan issue, Democrats from corn-producing states are “strong supporters of policies that favor ethanol,” Mr. Manuel said. For example, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, and Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, introduced a bill that would grant relief funding to the biofuels industry hard hit by the coronavirus. Bipartisan groups of lawmakers from both chambers have written to Mr. Trump urging him to deny waiver requests. The Congressional Biofuels Caucus is led by two Democratic and two Republican House members. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign proposals include more funding for ethanol.

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“I saved their oil industry,” he said in July of Texas. “I created it; we became No. 1. We have millions of jobs. And we saved it, so Texas is not going to have to let go of millions and millions of people.”

Clearly Mr. Trump did not “create” the oil industry in Texas, which experienced its first oil boom at the start of the 20th century and has been the top oil-producing state in the country every year except one since 1970. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, set off another boom in Texas in 2011, while the United States became the top producer of oil and gas in the world in 2013.

As for his claims to have “saved” Texas’s oil industry, Mr. Trump was most likely referring to his role in helping broker a deal this year between Russia and Saudi Arabia to cut production, which in turn helped bolster collapsing oil prices. Still, there is little evidence that the oil industry has recovered. In Texas, the industry has continued to shed jobs while production declined.

Over all, “the fall in U.S. oil production since March is unprecedented in the historical record, and production has not rebounded despite the Nymex futures price returning to $40 per barrel,” said Ryan Kellogg, a professor and energy economist at the University of Chicago. “New drilling, as measured by rig counts, remains depressed at levels not seen since the Great Recession. Industry jobs will not come back until drilling rebounds.”   READ MORE