Want a Bipartisan Push on Climate Change? Start With Unleashing American Biofuels

by Jeff Cosman (Morning Consult/Attis Industries Inc.) ... And in November, a letter from the Department of Energy, the EPA and the United States Department of Agriculture to Congress laid out a plan to encourage the use of efficient and carbon-neutral products made from woody biomass. In particular, it highlighted how producing materials, fuels and power from trees can encourage sustainable forestry and reforestation, help rural economies and reduce emissions.

Meanwhile, the new Democratic House majority seems eager to take aggressive steps to combat climate change, such as establishing a select committee on climate change and the much-discussed Green New Deal. Removing regulatory obstacles to sustainably produced biofuel and biomass products offers a perfect bipartisan first step in that direction.

With an administration that is actively looking for ways to increase American energy exports and help rural economies flourish and a House majority committed to curbing pollution and climate change, the biofuels and bioproduct industries offer a chance to support all those goals at once.

Chief among these bipartisan priorities should be expansion of the RFS pathways. Quite simply, the emergence of new biomass processing technologies means that it is time for an update of the decade-old regulations. We now have the technology to turn vast amounts of excess timber and forest waste into renewable, sustainable fuel.

This doesn’t just include the Southeast, where a glut of timber has sent many landowners in search of alternative revenue streams, but also the West, where wildfire management efforts produce vast quantities of brush and small trees that have to be disposed of somehow.

EPA must finalize approvals for fast-growing tree species like hybrid poplar, willow, and southern pine to be included in the RFS.

Next, the federal government should amend the complex rules on co-processing and bio-intermediates that require biofuel processing at a single facility to qualify for RFS credits. This needlessly restricts the use of efficient localized pre-processing and centralized refineries and makes it harder to economically produce biofuels and products.

Third, any effort to encourage the use of clean-burning, higher-octane fuels must include ethanol — the most cost-efficient and cleanest source of octane available. It offers the clearest path forward to meet the EPA’s broader greenhouse gas reduction targets for the country.

But as new legislation continues to crop up, it is essential that sustainable high-ethanol blends remain part of the solution, whether that be in the form of new infrastructure for E-15, the proposed Green New Deal or a high-octane fuel standard.

Fourth, the government needs to commit to supporting the development of cleaner burning “second generation” cellulosic fuels .... READ MORE