CAN YOU SAY BLENDING WALL?

Apparently I’m not the only fool who can see that we are crashing into the blending wall.

This informative article in Platts arrives at the same conclusion.  (Platts is a leading global provider of energy, petrochemicals and metals information, …)

One slight problem in the article, the authors completely misunderstand the cause. Here is their excuse:

“When the volumetric blending levels were set for the RFS in 2007, lawmakers, as well as industry representatives, didn’t expect the level of ethanol produced to exceed 10% of the national gasoline supply until much later this decade. But steadily declining gasoline demand coupled with increased fuel efficiency mean that benchmark, called the “blend wall,” will hit this year and, for some refiners, may have already been reached.”

Are you kidding me? Clearly the four people attributed at the end of this article never read the RFS mandate in EISA 2007, or having read it, did not understand it. My guess it is the former.

Nowhere in the act is there any discussion of a 10% level of ethanol blending. E10 is NOT mentioned in the act and the act is not a mandatory E10 law.  Gasoline with 10% ethanol is NOT a Renewable Fuel as defined in the act. The entire act is obviously targeted towards increasing the production and distribution of E85 and the increased production of flex-fuel vehicles.  All of the corporate welfare granted by the act is for these three objectives. The only Renewable Fuel defined in the act is E85 in several places, and in one place it is defined as any blend of E11 and above. Since the blending quota table in the act continues to require ever increasing amounts of ethanol be blended out through 2022, the only possible way of ever meeting the blending quotas was to produce copious amounts of E85.

It is going to be absolutely hilarious in the next couple of years when the blending quotas, which are cast in stone in the law, completely swamp the gasoline pool, with no place to put billions of gallons of excess ethanol and there will finally be no way to strip RINS because every producer will have to purchase a quota of ethanol that will exceed 100% of the amount that they can put in their gasoline production.  All I can imagine is a tank farm boom to store the excess ethanol at our terminals and a steady increase in gasoline price to cover the ethanol that the producers will be forced to buy with nowhere to use it.  I guess they are hopeful they can sell it in the international market.

Of course the supreme irony is that the ethanol production increases demanded for every year from 2015 to 2022 must be met essentially by cellulosic ethanol production which nobody can make in economically viable commercial amounts.  So it isn’t just a blending wall we are finally crashing into, it is also a production wall.

I wonder when the EPA, the politicians, the media and the American people are going to finally figure what a ridiculous, unworkable  sham the RFS mandate in EISA 2007 really is.  I may be a fool, but I figured it out as soon as I actually read the act back in 2009.  If you would like to read the act, you can find it here.