Agreement on legislation to allow year-round E15 sales continued to elude farm and oil interests despite a Sunday deadline.
A draft plan by the House GOP’s Rural Domestic Energy Council failed to win support by the weekend from mid-sized oil refiners who killed year-round E15 in an earlier defense bill.
Despite breaks for those refiners from having to bear the cost of small refiner exemptions, it didn’t seem to be enough. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is a long-time E15 booster.
“We got a few medium-sized refineries, some of them making a billion dollars a year. They want to be included. I never heard that for seven years, and that’s what’s holding up E15.”
Despite not reassigning exempted volumes to mid-sized refineries, those refiners argued that expanding the U.S. market for corn-ethanol would cause them to shut down.
House Ag Chair GT Thompson told Agri-Pulse he won’t attach year-round E15 to his farm bill, and Nebraska Republican Adrian Smith said of other must-pass bills.
“The must-pass legislation strategy, that probably wouldn’t be until the end of the year. I’d like to get that done before that.”
But a bigger problem may be lurking in the Senate, where oil industry allies from states like Texas, Wyoming, and Oklahoma argue more corn ethanol sales mean less oil business.
Top corn producing states like Iowa and Illinois see year-round E15 as a “gamechanger” for corn demand, prices, and the farm economy and recently gained momentum from President Trump’s support.
But election-year politics and competing controversies over Homeland Security funding and voter ID legislation will likely make passing even a farm bill a heavy lift for Congress.