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MOSCOW (MRC) -- The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency was set to miss a deadline on Monday to announce how much
renewable fuel the nation’s refiners must blend into their fuel mix next year,
raising uncertainty in the fuel market and prompting one biofuel association to
threaten to take the agency to court, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Under
federal law, the EPA must finalize its decision on the annual biofuel blending
volume requirements it imposes on the refining industry for the next year by
Nov. 30. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.
“At this
point, it likely makes more sense to let the new administration handle the 2021
RVO (Renewable Volume Obligations) rulemaking process entirely,” said Geoff
Cooper, the president of the Renewable Fuels Association, one of the nation’s
biggest biofuel industry groups. Growth Energy, another U.S. biofuel industry
association, said it intends to file a lawsuit to force the Trump
administration’s EPA to act “immediately."
The American Fuel and
Petrochemical Manufacturers, a top refinery industry association, said it hoped
the EPA will “soon provide certainty” to its members. Under the U.S. Renewable
Fuel Standard, refiners must blend billions of gallons of ethanol and other
biofuels into their fuel pool, or buy credits from those that do - a policy that
has created a huge market for corn-based ethanol but which the oil industry
loathes.
While the Trump administration has mainly hit its deadlines for
setting specific biofuel volumes mandates under the RFS, the process this year
has been complicated by the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
Slumping fuel consumption has led refiners to argue for lower volume mandates to
match demand, and biofuels producers to argue that doing so would only hurt them
more.
The EPA has also left undressed a number of other questions that
will likely need to be dealt with by the incoming Biden administration,
including requests from oil industry advocates for the EPA to ease 2020
compliance because of the impact of the pandemic, and requests from the biofuel
industry for the agency to ditch a waiver program it argued has illegally eroded
demand for ethanol.
We remind that
PetroChina has nearly doubled the amount of Russian crude being processed at its
refinery in Dalian, the company's biggest, since January 2018, as a new supply
agreement had come into effect. The Dalian Petrochemical Corp, located in the
northeast port city of Dalian, was expected to process 13 million tonnes, or
260,000 bpd of Russian pipeline crude in 2018, up by about 85 to 90 percent from
the previous year's level. Dalian has the capacity to process about 410,000 bpd
of crude. The increase follows an agreement worked out between the Russian and
Chinese governments under which Russia's top oil producer Rosneft was to supply
30 million tonnes of ESPO Blend crude to PetroChina in 2018, or about 600,000
bpd. That would have represented an increase of 50 percent over 2017
volumes.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing PE and
polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report, PE
imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year on year and
reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the
greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia
increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months
of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase
in imports. |
