Today, EPA released its final RFS biofuels volumes for 2023-2025. The final Renewable Volume Obligations (RVOs) mandate the amount of biofuels – such as corn ethanol and soy biodiesel – that must be blended into U.S. transportation fuels each year.
The final announcement today is another stark reminder of how the RFS has failed consumers, taxpayers, and the climate.
The RFS was created in the 2005 energy bill and expanded in the 2007 energy bill with goals of better energy security and less greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The RFS required 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be consumed by 2022.
EPA’s final rule announced today, however, will require just 20.94 billion gallons to be blended into U.S. transportation fuel – like gasoline and diesel – this year. In other words, just 58 percent of Congress’s original biofuels target will be met in 2023.
The failure of the cellulosic ethanol industry to get off the ground – despite decades of hefty taxpayer subsidies – is a primary reason why actual biofuels consumption is significantly lower than Congress once envisioned. The final 2023 cellulosic biofuels mandate will represent just five percent of the target Congress in 2007. Cellulosic biofuels were intended to be derived from non-food-based biofuels like perennial grasses and corn residues, the types of fuels President Bush touted in his 2006 State of the Union address.
Instead, the RFS will primarily be filled with food-based biofuels that increase food prices, distort markets, and worsen climate change. Biofuels like biomass-based diesel (derived primarily from soybeans) and corn ethanol have also siphoned tens of billions in taxpayer subsidies since the 1970s. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) kept special interest subsidies flowing.
It’s about time the U.S. biofuels industry was allowed to stand on its own two feet – without taxpayer support.
To read TCS’s joint comments to EPA on the proposed biofuels volumes earlier this year, please click here.
