EPA Resets Ethanol Rules To Reflect Reality: Cellulosic Sources Don't Exist

For many months now, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has faced a dilemma: What to do about its rules that millions of gallons of cellulosic ethanol be blended into the U.S. gasoline supply.

Now, The Detroit News reports that the agency has decided to accept reality: Supplies of that fuel simply don't exist, so the rules are being changed--at least retroactively.

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Under the 2007 Energy Independence & Security Act, Congress required that fuel blenders incorporate increasingly large volumes of ethanol into U.S. vehicle fuels.

While adequate supplies exist of conventional ethanol refined from corn, there's also a separate requirement for ethanol from cellulosic sources--using feedstocks that could range from switchgrasses to perhaps even municipal waste streams.

And those cellulosic supplies essentially don't exist. A number of research projects, funded five years ago or more, have failed to produce commercially viable results or scale up to production successfully.

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Congress mandated in 2007 that by 2010, 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol be added to the overall vehicle fuel supply. And that number grew swiftly, to 250 million gallons in 2011, 500 million in 2012, and fully 1 billion gallons in 2013.