PORTLAND, Maine - Maine's two senators this week signed onto a bi-partisan effort aimed at providing more certainty to the biodiesel industry.
Independent Angus King and Republican Susan Collins joined 30 other senators in urging the Environmental Protection Agency to act on long-delayed production standards. And at least one company in Maine will be keenly awaiting the agency's response.
It's "business as usual" on the production floor of Maine Standard Biofuels in Portland - the state's only commercial bio-diesel manufacturer. 'So, here at the front end, this is where we off-load the oil from our trucks," says Alex Pine. "So they come in, they're giant vacuum trucks so it's like a vacuum cleaner on wheels, and they put the oil in these tanks."
Pine, the company's outreach director, explains how used cooking oil, grease and other food waste is shipped here from restaurants across the region. Fats and oils are then extracted from the waste, treated and turned into fuel. Some of that becomes motor fuel, some is used as home heating oil, some is turned into soap.
Last the year the company produced just over half-a-million barrels of bio-diesel. But this represented a massive slowdown in growth and only a slight increase over the year before. And he attributes that to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency's failure to set production levels, as required under the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS.
"And we didn't really know: Should we be producing as much as we can? Or shall we hold back on production because the levels are going to be lower this year?" Pine says.
The RFS program was established by Congress 10 years ago as a way of increasing the amount of renewable energy blended into the mainstream U.S. fuel supply. In the case of biodiesel, this would ensure a certain volume of it would be mixed in with regular, petroleum-based diesel.
But Pine says the EPA set no volume levels for last year, or this year, and 2016 levels should also have been established by now. "After summertime, they said they'd release the renewable standards for that year," he says. "Didn't happen. Then they said after elections. Didn't happen again. Then they said later in the year. Didn't happen. They said January of 2015, and it still hasn't happened. They're now saying sometime in spring."
"It has really created a lot of turmoil in the industry," says Ben Evans, who is with the National Biodiesel Board. Evans says the national trend mirrors what Maine Standard Biofuels experienced: strong growth up until 2013, when 1.8 billion gallons were made by the country's approximately 200 registered producers.
Since then, however, Evans says life has gotten increasingly hard for the sector - with many facilities downsizing, and some going out of business. "We haven't really had a functioning RFS policy for going on two years now. It leaves the producers to effectively guess at what the market will be."
Evans says the recent decline in crude oil prices has not helped the biodiesel industry, but it also highlights the market volatility that justifies the RFS program.
So what's holding up the federal government on establishing biodiesel production standards?
"EPA is caught in a conundrum," says Jamie Py, of the Maine Energy Marketers Association. Py says the conundrun, in this case, has to do with declining gasoline consumption.
The RFS program calls for a physical amount of renewable fuel, rather than a percentage, to be blended into the national supply. This number is meant to get bigger every year, to keep pace with rising gasoline consumption. "But what's happened is that, across the United States, the amount of gasoline sold has decreased," Py says.
That's something Py says nobody expected a few years ago. And it means that the percentage of renewables in the fuel supply will increase every year as new production standards are introduced.
Py says that has been met with strong resistance from auto-manufacturers, many of whom have not approved their engines to run on gasoline that has more than a 10 percent blend. And it's this impasse, says Py, that's held up the whole RFS program. He predicts it's going to take a change in the law to get it going again.
An EPA spokesperson declined to be interviewed for this story. But the agency did issue a brief statement saying it fully intends to get the program back on track this year.