The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to release its draft rule for mandated volumes of biofuels for 2014. Earlier this year, EPA indicated that it understood that a limited demand for biofuels, particularly for ethanol, conflicts with the scheduled mandated volumes written in the law....

In a recent paper, we estimated the potential demand for ethanol consumed in E85 using an estimated distribution of E85 acceptance by consumers and by calculating the average distance that owners of flex vehicles would have to drive to find an existing gas station that sells the fuel. Two issues...

Biofuel mandates in 2014 and 2015 are scheduled to push ethanol consumption beyond the E10 blend wall-the amount of ethanol that can be easily consumed in the United States in a 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline blend. Numerous interest groups and academics are calling on the...

Past studies that examine the impact of ethanol mandates on fuel prices make the assumption that ethanol and gasoline are perfect substitutes because they are both sources of energy in transportation fuels. These studies, however, have been of limited use in informing current policy debates...

The American Petroleum Institute (API) commissioned NERA Economic Consulting to study "the economics and compliance issues related to the implementation of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2)." NERA's October 2012 report finds that ethanol and biodiesel blend walls create insurmountable barriers...

The proposed decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce biofuel mandates that can be met by ethanol to about 13 billion gallons is predicated in part on a finding that consumption of ethanol is largely limited to the amount that can be consumed in E10, a blended fuel...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed in November to reduce 2014 biofuel mandates. One concern expressed by EPA is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to consume the 2014 target levels of ethanol in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) because of infrastructure issues....

The Environmental Protection Agency created a tradable commodity called RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers)-serial numbers that allow tracking batches of biofuels-to enforce biofuel mandates. To prove they have met their annual biofuel obligations under the Renewable Fuels Standard gasoline...