Clean Fuels asks US EPA to maintain RFS compliance deadline

Clean Fuels Alliance America sent a letter Jan. 8 to U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, asking the agency to maintain the 2025 Renewable Fuel Standard compliance deadline on March 31 to mitigate the impacts of rulemaking delays.

Under existing EPA rules, the compliance deadline will automatically shift to June 1 if the agency fails to finalize the 2026 renewable volume obligations (RVOs) by the end of January.

The shift will compound the negative economic effects that biobased diesel producers and farmers are already experiencing from the rulemaking delay.

“Ongoing delays in the rulemaking are creating intolerable uncertainty for biomass-based diesel producers and for farmers,” Clean Fuels writes in the letter. “Biomass-based diesel producers and soybean processors are currently negotiating feedstock contracts, fuel production and offtake agreements, and investment decisions for 2026. The lack of certainty in the RFS program is even now impacting those market decisions.”

Biobased diesel production is idling at the start of this year, the letter points out, because the annual volumes are not in place.

The slowdown in production will impact the crop prices soybean farmers receive and undermine significant U.S. investments in oilseed processing and fuel production capacity.

A copy of the letter is available here.

“EPA has proposed the most robust volumes in the history of the RFS program,” said Kurt Kovarik, Clean Fuels’ vice president of federal affairs. “EPA, USDA and other administration leaders know that the RFS is driving investment in American energy production, creating jobs in rural communities and building desperately needed new markets for American farmers. Finalizing the 2026 rules in a timely manner is crucial to ensuring those economic and energy security benefits are delivered.”

Kovarik continued, saying, “Automatic RFS-compliance delays were put in place by prior administrations to mitigate the harm to refiners from continual rulemaking delays. As EPA now works to get the RFS program back on track, it should mitigate the harm to biomass-based diesel producers and farmers by maintaining timely compliance deadlines.”