At the end of this month, President Barack Obama and many of the leaders of his administration will travel to Paris to negotiate with the heads of other nations around the world about slowing the pace of global climate change. Like millions of other Americans, I applaud this effort.
Because the President understands that the warming of our planet impacts our national security, the health of our bodies and environment, our ability to provide food and clean drinking water and many other issues that influence the well-being of every person today – he has made fighting climate change one the pillars of his legacy.
However, while the President is going to Paris to tackle climate change across the globe, his own Administration could be doing much more here at home to reduce carbon emissions from transportation fuels.
Perhaps the same day the President arrives in Paris, the Environmental Protection Agency will be issuing the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS-2), a federal policy that requires certain levels of biofuels to be blended into the domestic fuel supply.
By the end of this month, the EPA has said it will release long-delayed RFS standards covering the next few years. While much of the debate around the RFS has focused on ethanol produced from corn, the administration’s decision will also have a profound and lasting impact on the future of Advanced Biofuels under the program such as biodiesel.
EPA designated biodiesel as an Advanced Biofuel because it burns cleaner than diesel made from petroleum. Biodiesel is the only Advanced Biofuel commercially available on a large scale. It is a diesel replacement made from an increasingly diverse mix of resources including soybean oil, recycled cooking oil and animal fats. If you put diesel in your vehicle at any filling station in the nation, chances are that biodiesel is blended in.
To give you an idea of just how much better biodiesel is for the environment, rather than traditional diesel made from petroleum, the California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) recently determined that biodiesel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent and often by as much as 81 percent versus petroleum. CARB made this determination when setting statewide fuels standards designed to cut carbon emissions drastically in the state.
CARB’s findings echo what the EPA determined when it implemented the latest RFS policy – that biodiesel reduces carbon emissions from 57 percent to 86 percent. In fact, since the creation of the RFS, biodiesel has reduced carbon emissions in this country by nearly 80 million metric tons, the same as removing over 16 million passenger vehicles from our roadways.
The current RFS proposal would gradually raise biodiesel volumes by about 100 million gallons per year to a standard of 1.9 billion gallons in 2017. The biodiesel industry produced nearly that volume in 2013, so it is mystifying why the EPA wouldn’t pursue more aggressive growth. The industry requested a biodiesel standard of 2.7 billion gallons by 2017.
Unless the EPA raises these levels for the biodiesel industry when the final RFS is released (before or on November 30th) hundreds of millions of gallons of biodiesel may not be produced. This means that vehicles in this country will consume hundreds of millions of gallons of additional fossil fuel with significantly higher emissions.
When the RFS was created, one of the goals was to ensure that every year, this nation was capable of producing and using more Advanced Biofuels. It was Senator Obama, along with Senator Lugar who first introduced the American Fuels Act of 2006. That bill called for 2 billion gallons of biodiesel by 2015, and became the precursor to the RFS-2 passed in 2007.
The US biodiesel industry was on track to achieve that level, along with all the economic and environmental benefits it brought with it, until the Administration called for a dialing back of the progress. The biodiesel industry hopes that the President and his administration will continue their push to fight climate change, and allow the domestic biodiesel industry to produce as much clean-burning fuel as it can. If so, it will help cement the President’s legacy of being the first commander in chief to make combating climate change one of his top priorities.
