No news is good news for refineries
Source: By Kelsey Tamborrino, Politico • Posted: Tuesday, June 12, 2018
“No deal allows the EPA to continue to implement actions as they see fit, and those have been benefiting refiners,” said Andy Lipow, an oil industry analyst with Lipow Oil Associates. “[Pruitt’s] actions are geared toward helping manufacturing, and the oil industry is just one of the many he’s been helping through the deregulation process.”
But while those waivers have helped bring RIN prices down, ethanol producers complain it removes an incentive for oil industry players to develop new infrastructure to increase fuel blending. Brooke Coleman, executive director of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council, suggested Pruitt was pushing the limits of the program without concern that the changes could be cut down in court, as scandals mount around him.
“At the end of the day the political cost of all of this stuff ultimately falls on an administration that is unlikely to include him,” Coleman said. “One has to wonder if his systematic dismantling of the RFS is something that comes to his benefit and to no one else and that’s fine with him.”