In the United States, we have more than 300 million gallons of planned cellulosic ethanol production capacity waiting to come online. But that fuel production is stalled, in part, because of a lack of an available market here in the United States, due to the regulatory cap on amount of ethanol that can be blended into gasoline.
The E15 Green Jobs Waiver, filed with the Environmental Protection Agency by Growth Energy in March 2009, would raise the regulatory cap by 50 percent, opening the market for ethanol and drawing fresh investment into cellulosic.
How important is cellulosic to our industry? Approval of the Green Jobs waiver would create more than 136,000 new jobs in the U.S., reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 7 billion gallons, reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to removing 10.5 million cars from the road, and revitalize our rural communities.
Last week, the EPA announced that final testing through the Green Jobs Waiver will not be complete until the fall due to extra testing added by the DOE. In response to the EPA’s announcement, Growth Energy sent a letter to President Obama urging him to take whatever steps necessary to accelerate the completion of the testing. Growth Energy CEO Tom Buis explained that the data submitted with the waiver proves the benefits of ethanol as a transportation fuel: “adding additional tests will do nothing to meet our nation’s objective of energy independence, and in fact will also delay the development of cellulosic ethanol,” he wrote.
Every day we delay the decision on moving to E15 is another day we continue our addiction to foreign oil and one less day spent on investments in alternative fuels like ethanol.
With fossil fuels getting dirtier, costlier and riskier to extract, now is the time we should move on expanding the production and consumption of clean, renewable fuels like ethanol.
If this nation is ever going to advance to cellulosic ethanol, it must raise the market for all ethanol. Without E15, there is no market for cellulosic ethanol. And without grain ethanol producers, there would be no cellulosic ethanol producers, because it is the grain producers who are leading the development of cellulosic.
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