Shell Oil company representatives are pressing the White House for a one-year delay in implementing a controversial regulation that would expand America's biofuels mandate beginning in January. ———- Right, a biodiesel manufacturing plant in Iowa. ———- Two Shell employees met with administration officials earlier this month to express concerns with U.S. EPA's proposed renewable-fuels standard, according to White House meeting records. Five White House Office of Management and Budget officials and one EPA official attended. In documents submitted at the meeting, Shell executives said the rule's implementation should be pushed back at least until January 2011 to give renewable-fuels companies and petroleum refiners, blenders and importers time to comply, since the rule has not yet been finished. The EPA regulation dramatically enlarges the existing renewable-fuels program to 36 billion gallons by 2022 compared with 9 billion gallons in 2008. The 2007 energy law authorizing the regulation also created explicit mandates for emerging cellulosic ethanol and advanced biofuel technologies and specified greenhouse gas reduction criteria for fuels to qualify. The continuing controversy over EPA's calculation of the greenhouse-gas emissions reductions may have slowed progress in completing the rule. Environmental groups and the biofuels industry are in a tug of war – with EPA in the middle – on the inclusion of indirect international emissions caused when U.S. farmers produce fuel instead of food.
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As Deadline Nears, Shell Urges White House to Delay Biofuels Mandate One Year
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