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The RFS Motivates Industry to Solve the Blend Wall, BIO’s Brent Erickson Tells ABLC Attendees

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BIO&#39;s Brent Erickson, executive vice president of the Industrial &amp; Environmental Section, spoke at the Advanced Biofuel Leadership Conference in Washington, today, and said high prices for foreign oil have hastened the blend wall. The Renewable Fuel Standard forces us to solve our over-reliance on foreign oil.</p>

The Renewable Fuel Standard was designed to reduce our reliance on foreign oil in transportation; the so-called blend wall is not a reason to abandon it, Brent Erickson, executive vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) Industrial & Environmental Section told attendees of the Advanced Biofuel Leadership Conference today. The conference runs April 15 -17 in Washington DC.

 “The United States still needs alternatives to oil in order to ease consumers’ pain at the pump,” Erickson said. “Continued reliance on foreign oil is the cause of high fuel prices, not the Renewable Fuel Standard. Any weakening of the RFS will only hurt consumers. And continued development of advanced biofuels is key to our energy security in the future.”

 “Oil refiners’ most recent complaints about the Renewable Fuel Standard’s impacts on American consumers are just distractions from the high price of oil,” Erickson continued. “The oil refiners have hastened the onset of the blend wall by destroying demand for transportation fuel through high prices. The Renewable Fuel Standard was intended to change the behavior of fuel producers to increase biofuel blending and reduce reliance on foreign oil. The RFS is not broken, in fact it is working as Congress intended.”