The House and Energy Commerce Committee has released its third white paper on the Renewable Fuel Standard, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Environmental Impacts.” Executive Vice President of the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE), Brian Jennings, responded with written comments that included but were not limited to feedback on the RFS role on the environment, agricultural sustainability and tailpipe emissions.

“…petroleum represents the most harmful source of transportation fuel while renewable fuels such as ethanol represent the safest. Recent crude oil spills have killed fish, animals, and plant life. Ethanol, on the other hand, is derived from plant life and ethanol coproducts are fed to fish and livestock. At the same time ethanol’s lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and production efficiencies are dramatically improving, extracting and processing crude oil into gasoline is becoming more expensive, inefficient, and destructive to the environment,” wrote Jennings. (Read ACE’s full comments here.)

The Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) responded to seven questions proposed in the white paper by proposing 10 questions of their own.(Read RFA’s full comments here.)

RFA President and CEO Bob Dinneen said, “When assessing the environmental impacts of renewable fuels, it is absolutely imperative to make appropriate comparisons to the impacts associated with the use of petroleum fuels. In other words, it is inappropriate to examine the environmental effects of the RFS without simultaneously examining the effects of not having the RFS. It is also important to compare new renewable fuels entering the market to the actual sources of marginal petroleum they are delaying and displacing.”