The Renewable Fuels Association on Friday urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to deny new petitions submitted by refiners for past-year waivers from their renewable volume obligations. In a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, RFA President and CEO Geoff Cooper argued that granting such waivers would be unlawful, inconsistent with the statute, and contrary to EPA&rsquo;s own policies and regulations.&nbsp;<a href="https://files.constantcontact.com/a8800d13601/3f6434ff-54dc-4876-aee9-5677eb220f18.pdf">According to the letter</a>, the petitions are nothing more than a &ldquo;thinly veiled attempt to circumvent&rdquo; the Tenth Circuit&rsquo;s decision in January, in the case of&nbsp;Renewable Fuels Association et al. v. EPA, that struck down a number of exemptions granted by the agency.
In the letter, Cooper cited May 20 testimony by U.S. Department of Energy Under Secretary Mark Menezes, who described these new petitions as &ldquo;gap filings&rdquo; intended to establish, without regard to merit, a continuous string of exemptions &ldquo;to be consistent with the Tenth Circuit decision.&rdquo; In January, the court found that refiners may only receive an exemption if it is an extension of a previously existing exemption. In light of the court&rsquo;s ruling, some small refineries are now seeking retroactive exemptions for previous years to &ldquo;fill the gaps&rdquo; so that they may argue they had a continuously extended exemption.
According to RFA, some refiners are trying to &ldquo;&hellip;pretend there could have been a hardship years ago that could justify the granting of an exemption today,&nbsp;years&nbsp;after the compliance deadline had passed for the year the exemption is sought. It is utterly preposterous that EPA would even consider requests for prior-year exemptions from refineries who readily complied with that year&rsquo;s RFS obligations and who did not originally seek exemptions during the year of purported &lsquo;hardship.&rsquo; Now, these refiners are attempting to re-write history in a cynical attempt to maintain an illegally exploited compliance loophole.&rdquo;
In his letter, Cooper also noted that these prior-year petitions are not being counted on the EPA&rsquo;s online small refinery exemption &ldquo;dashboard,&rdquo; significantly undermining the promise of increased transparency made by EPA following the secretive issuance of 54 exemptions from the 2016-2017 RFS compliance years. &ldquo;Clearly, only refiners applying for past-year petitions know what is going on at EPA, while biofuel producers and the general public are again being kept in the dark.&rdquo;
&ldquo;We urge EPA to clarify that small refinery exemption extension petitions for past compliance years are inconsistent with the RFS and will not be entertained by the Agency,&rdquo; Cooper concluded. &ldquo;We also urge that EPA expeditiously deny any petitions that have already been received, or that are received going forward, for past compliance years.&rdquo;
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The Renewable Fuels Association on May 22 sent a letter to U.S. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler urging the agency to deny new petitions submitted by refiners for past-year waivers from their renewable volume obligations. 

RFA asks EPA to deny secretive “gap year” RFS waiver requests

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