US refiners blast draft House bill on biofuels

27 November 2007 23:48  [Source: ICIS news]

WASHINGTON (ICIS news)--US refining industry officials charged on Tuesday that new US House energy legislation mandating nearly 30bn gal/year of biofuels consumption by 2015 disregards studies critical of renewable fuels and will have dire consequences.

 

The National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA) said a draft energy bill being circulated among House of Representatives members “establishes mandates for fuels that do not even exist for commercial use, such as cellulosic ethanol and biomass-based diesel”.

 

The draft energy bill would impose a new renewable fuel standard (RFS) or mandate for increased US consumption of conventional corn-based ethanol on a schedule beginning at 9.5bn gal/year in 2008 and reaching 20.5bn gal/year by 2015.

 

Current US ethanol production, which is wholly corn-based, is about 7.2bn gal/year. An existing federal mandate for biofuel consumption requires 7.5bn gal/year by 2012.

 

An energy bill passed by the US Senate earlier this year included a biofuels mandate of 36bn gal/year by 2022. An energy bill approved in the House earlier this year does not contain a new renewable fuels mandate. Those two measures are now in an informal Senate-House conference process under Democrat majority leadership in hopes of shaping a single energy measure that both chambers will accept.

 

The new House draft energy bill also would require 8bn gal/year of cellulosic ethanol consumption by 2015 and 1bn gal/year of biomass-based diesel usage by that year.

 

The association charged that House passage of the draft energy bill would “disregard the findings of virtually every study that has been released” regarding the energy and environmental benefits of biofuels.  NPRA cited studies critical of biofuels by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among others.

 

“The draft legislation also ignores every concern raised by a wide variety of other important organizations, including food producers, environmentalists and economists,” said NPRA executive vice president Charles Drevna.

 

Drevna said the new House energy bill language “puts the cart before the horse” by mandating consumption levels for biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol when the technology for wide scale commercial production of cellulosic fuels has not yet been established.

 

“Congress should not rush to pass legislation before there is sufficient, transparent deliberation and all the facts are in on what the consequences of a significant increase in the federal RFS mandate would be,” Drevna said.

By: Joe Kamalick
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