Two steps forward make no progress on a treadmill stuck in reverse. Still, US Reps. Bill Flores (R-Tex.) and John Shimkus (R-Ill.) deserve credit for recognizing that the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) program needs work.
The lawmakers, both members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, have released legislation aiming to modernize requirements for biologically derived additives to vehicle fuel. Obsolescence, however, is not the program’s main problem.
The 21st Century Transportation Fuels Act, now a discussion draft, at least capitalizes on the dominant biofuel’s most important value: Ethanol powerfully boosts gasoline octane. The draft legislation’s main innovation is a national octane standard.
Attention to octane
New attention to gasoline octane is appropriate. Modern engine designs can reach impressive levels of performance and efficiency but need high-octane fuel. Octane thus represents an important lever of policies addressing vehicle mileage and air emissions. With its high blending octane value in gasoline, which must be balanced against the additive’s relatively low energy content and kick to fuel volatility, ethanol has a strong claim to a share of the gasoline market and related policies.
The discussion draft from Flores and Shimkus accommodates this potential. It sets a national standard of 95 research octane number (RON) and calls for necessary adjustments by vehicle manufacturers and fuel suppliers. Apparently, the legislation uses RON instead of antiknock index—half the sum of RON plus motor octane number—because RON alone is considered most relevant to aggressively designed engines. Antiknock index is the value displayed on US gasoline pumps.
Although stringency has been controversial lately, the need for vehicle mileage standards has longstanding political support. For as long as this is so, and especially when a toughening remains under discussion, octane elevation linked to engine design deserves new emphasis in fuel policy.
The Flores-Shimkus initiative steps constructively, too, when it limits requirements for advanced biofuels to what’s demonstrably possible. A glaring folly of the RFS program is the effort to make ethanol from cellulose by statute. Legislation creating the RFS set challenge targets that have proven wildly ambitious. The Environmental Protection Agency has authority to adjust annual requirements but too often has seen fit to test industrial and technological capability with still-impossible goals. The draft legislation limits a year’s target volume to the prior year’s production.
Welcome as that accommodation to reality would be, it highlights a fatal drawback of the Flores-Shimkus plan. The legislation retains volumetric requirements for biofuels, including conventional ethanol. Inevitably when the government requires sales of anything, the regulatory mechanism—the RFS program—becomes complex, inefficient, and costly.
Volumetric mandates serve no national interest. The environmental benefits of renewable vehicle fuels are minor at best, and the US no longer craves the supply. The mandates benefit only producers of the mandated fuels, especially grain distillers and corn farmers. Even for those coddled interests, mandates should have diminishing allure by now.
A national program focused on octane would provide ethanol suppliers all the market assurance any business should need. It would, for example, legitimize expansion of the ethanol blending limit in gasoline for use by engines suitably designed. Broadening of the increase in recent years to 15 vol % from 10 vol % ranks high on the ethanol industry’s endless list of policy demands, resisted by refiners and vehicle and equipment manufacturers worried about engine damage.
Higher ethanol blend
For octane optimization, the benefits of an ethanol concentration higher than 15% probably offsets the energy and volatility penalties if misfuelling can be managed. The high-octane gasoline envisioned by Flores and Shimkus can be a 20% ethanol blend designed for engines in vehicles beginning in model-year 2023. That should ease the ethanol industry’s worry about market loss.
Volumetric mandates make an inflexible mess of the RFS program. They would make reorientation of fuel policy to octane too rigid to work. The Flores-Shimkus initiative deserves serious attention. But it needs to shed market controls destined to keep policy moving backwards.