Posted on 09/30/2015 12:29:54 PM PDT by thackney
If the Senate is going to lift the nation’s longstanding ban on oil exports, Sen. Pat Toomey wants to make sure a federal biofuels mandate vanishes at the same time.
The Republican from Pennsylvania is advancing a plan — cosponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. — that would lift the requirement to blend traditional ethanol-based renewable fuels into U.S. gasoline.
Toomey is set to offer the measure as an amendment to legislation that would authorize widespread oil exports when it is considered by the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.
The biofuel change is sought by some refiners — including a handful in Toomey’s home state of Pennsylvania — that say they are hitting a blend wall where they can no longer incorporate enough ethanol to meet steadily escalating volumetric targets without exceeding a 10 percent threshold acceptable for use in all cars and trucks.
Three Pennsylvania-based refiners — Delta Air Lines’ Monroe Energy, Philadelphia Energy Solutions and PBF Energy — are actively lobbying against crude exports.
Even some refiners who do not oppose oil exports, such as Tesoro Corp., have pressed for an overhaul of the federal Renewable Fuels Standard, possibly as part of a broader debate on crude trade policy.
An RFS change is seen as potentially softening the blow for domestic refiners who could face higher costs for U.S. crude if oil exports are widely allowed.
But it does not appear likely a majority of the Banking Committee members would vote to approve a sweeping change to the renewable fuels law. And it is possible that Toomey’s biofuel proposal would not even be considered “germane” to the panel’s work, potentially allowing it to be ruled out of order before a substantive debate or vote on the measure.
Toomey is one of two Republicans on the Senate banking panel facing competing pressures on the oil export bill. The other: Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, who, like Toomey, is trying to hold on to his seat in the Senate during next year’s elections.
The underlying oil exports bill was already approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The Senate banking panel also claims jurisdiction over the measure.
Toomey’s biofuels proposal takes aim at the biggest piece of the Renewable Fuels Standard, which requires refiners to incorporate steadily increasing amounts of the alternative fuels. Under a stand-alone Feinstein-Toomey bill, refiners would still have to satisfy a mandate for advanced biofuels, but the annual quotas for traditional renewable fuels — typically ethanol derived from corn — would disappear.
Toomey has said that under the RFS, “refiners, such as ours in Trainer, Pa., are forced to make a choice: increase the ethanol content in their fuel blends or pay a penalty by purchasing credits from energy traders.”
A Toomey spokeswoman, Elizabeth “E.R.” Anderson, said Toomey’s move to push the RFS change signals he “is tired of the government using corporate welfare to shower money on a favored industry and then sending the bill to taxpayers.”
The underlying oil exports bill would undo decades-old restrictions that block most U.S. crude from being sold outside the country. Refined petroleum products, such as gasoline and diesel, are not affected by the ban, which also makes exceptions for oil shipments to Canada and exports of some Californian and Alaskan crude.
Oil producers argue the change would give at least a modest boost to U.S. crude prices, pushing them closer to that of the higher-cost international Brent crude benchmark.
A report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued late Tuesday concluded that a House bill lifting the oil export ban would add an estimated $1.4 billion to federal coffers over the next 10 years, with the extra revenue coming from “new oil and gas leases” on federal lands and waters.
Oil export advocates said the calculation lowballed the true potential benefits, by focusing only on the government selling more federal drilling rights and ignoring broader, economy-wide changes, such as more jobs tied to increased energy development and the tax revenue associated with them. They are pushing the CBO to do another analysis of the exports bill, this time dynamically scoring the potential government revenue from liberalizing oil trade.
“As concluded in more than a half dozen studies and reports, lifting the ban would reduce our trade deficit, increase GDP, protect and create jobs and generate additional tax revenues,” said George Baker, executive director of the Producers for American Crude Oil Exports. “None of these macroeconomic considerations were captured in the CBO analysis.”
Jay Hauck, executive director of Consumers and Refiners United for Domestic Energy, which opposes the exports bill, noted that the CBO report “confirms that domestic crude prices would rise as a result of exports.”
According to the analysis, domestic wellhead prices of light oil would climb roughly $2.50 per barrel over the next 10 years on an expected value basis.
The report itself casts doubt on the potential benefit for American producers, acknowledging that U.S. crude exports could be offset by production elsewhere around the world.
“The net benefit to U.S. producers would depend on whether other international suppliers would respond by lowering the prices they charge in order to maintain market share,” the CBO said, adding, that “is difficult to predict.”
Now that is the talk of the GOP majority we elected them to do.
You can sure tell that Toomey has no interest in winning the Iowa Caucus.
I am always appreciative of someone who does not play the same old political tune, but does what is sensible and good for the American people.
Does anyone remember Sunoco 260?
I miss the good old days.
Petroleum IS “biofuel”.
Renewable as well.
The time scale is a little difficult to use effectively, but a couple hundred million years or so, ready to go again!
I'm not so sure about that, if they can pressure-cook turkey guts into fuel in an hour, the ocean depths and geothermal temps may take a little longer, but....all the components are there.
Ocean depths are quite cold. The sediment build up needs to get quite thick to get the temperatures raised enough to start Thermal Depolymerization.
yes, finally some common sense on biofuels.
Yes, and I'm sure that's no problem as there must be hundreds of tons of dead plankton, algae and sea-life that falls to the bottom of every square mile of ocean floor, every day.
Additionally, it's not the same everywhere in the depths, just as it isn't on dry land, there are areas of high geothermal activity...and I'm sure areas go active and dormant over time...leaving large deposits of "cooked" compost.
Biofuel-based ethanol additives were always a boondoggle, more to gain approval in corn-growing states than to actually reduce dependence on so-called “fossil fuels”.
Axiomatic truth: the world is going to depend heavily on these “fossil fuels” for most of another century, and the myth of “peak petroleum” has been exploded over and over.
Even with so-called “alternative” energy sources, specifically air and solar, the systems only work if there is some back-up system, dependent on some fossil fuel source, to fill in the times and hours while the alternative sources cannot deliver any measurable quantity of energy.
Interim solution: go to Liquid fluoride Thorium reactors. which have ZERO chance of runaway blow-up, and the residual spent radioactive “waste” is only a very small part of that found with conventional uranium-fueled nuclear reactors.
In fact, part of the operation of these LFTR plants depends on “burning” this nuclear waste from uranium-fueled nuclear reactors. Using two stones to kill one bird, or something.
These reactors may be placed quite close to the point of electric power consumption, and may be far more compact than equivalent uranium-powered plants.
The big disadvantage of the thorium plants? They cannot be weaponized to produce material suitable for nuclear bombs.
The technology has been worked out, there are demonstration plants that have been built, there is only the matter of scaling the system up to adequate size for the applications to replace all coal plants and most natural-gas-powered plants. India is very close to having an operational plant, and China claims that they, too, will have a developed technology within ten years.
Where is the US on this technology? The Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment went online in 1964, and operated until 1969, when it was shut down and decommissioned. No further research has been conducted in the US since then, as it was considered to be a “poor allocation of resources”. No production of plutonium, couldn’t use the radioactive material generated to make weapons.
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