Ralph Lents

In a year that’s seen few rewards for Iowa corn producers, they recently scored a win from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Last month the EPA denied a majority of the “gap-year” small refinery exemptions from 2011-2018 compliance years under the Renewable Fuel Standard. Iowa Corn Promotion Board District 7 Director and Menlo farmer Ralph Lents says his Board and the Iowa Corn Growers Association has repeatedly pushed the EPA to deny these gap-year waivers for months, and he is glad the agency has taken steps to uphold the integrity of the RFS by denying the vast majority of the refinery petitions. Lents comments on whether this will lead to a larger ethanol output, “We hope so, we’ve got a couple foreign countries that would love to buy ethanol from us, that’d be in China and India. If we’d ever straighten out our trade issues they would buy a lot of ethanol from us because they both need to clean up their environments.”

Small refinery exemptions are granted from refineries’ annual Renewable Volume Obligations if they can demonstrate that compliance with the RVOs would cause the refinery to suffer disproportionate economic hardship. Gap-waivers for 2019 and 2020 are yet to be denied, and Lents says the ICPB and ICGA will continue to work on behalf of corn farmers to ensure the RFS is upheld, which requires a certain volume of renewable fuel to replace or reduce the amount of petroleum-based transportation fuel.