We will be at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hearing on the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), ready to kick off in just a couple of hours in Arlington, Va., just across the river from the nation’s capital. Advocates and friends of biofuels are expected to turn out en masse, including our friends from the National Biodiesel Board, who plan to bring about two dozen representatives of the U.S. biodiesel industry to make the case that biodiesel is already an EPA-designated Advanced Biofuel produced at a commercial-scale and how the EPA’s proposal to reduce biodiesel production to 1.28 billion gallons will hurt the economy and the environment.

“This industry has been running at an annualized rate of about 2 billion gallons since July. That’s displacing 2 billion gallons of petroleum diesel,” said Anne Steckel, NBB’s vice president of federal affairs. “You can’t cut it almost in half and expect jobs and businesses to survive.”

“What’s so frustrating about the proposal is that biodiesel is an EPA-designated Advanced Biofuel that has exceeded RFS targets. It’s an RFS success story that is creating the clean-energy jobs that the Obama Administration has pushed so hard for in recent years,” Steckel added. “There is not a commercial-scale fuel on the planet that beats the environmental benefits that biodiesel delivers. By the EPA’s own calculations, biodiesel reduces greenhouse gas emission by 57 percent to 86 percent. So we will be looking for answers from the EPA and the Administration about why they are doing this. It is not consistent with the Administration’s stated policy.”

I’ll be there all day to follow the events and provide you updates, right here on Domestic Fuel.