May 16th, 2013
By Robert Rapier, Guest blogger / March 22, 2013
Prices of ethanol credits have skyrocketed 1,400 percent as refiners get stuck with ethanol that they can’t profitably blend with gasoline. Courts may take up fairness of renewable fuel standard, which has caused the glut.
Last week, US refiners suffered a bit of a setback as the cost of complying with US ethanol mandates skyrocketed. The Financial Times recently reported that the price of ethanol credits has risen 1400 percent — from pennies to more than a dollar each — since the beginning of 2013. This situation was set into motion nearly a decade ago when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created a Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requiring 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel – primarily corn ethanol – to be blended into the fuel supply by 2012.
Read the full story here.
May 15th, 2013
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: May 9, 2013
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans continued a campaign to delay confirmation of President Obama’s second-term cabinet nominees on Thursday, blocking a committee vote on Gina McCarthy, the president’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
Related
The action came a day after Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee threw a wrench in the nomination of Thomas E. Perez to be labor secretary, delaying it for at least a week.
In both cases, Republican committee members said the nominees had failed to adequately respond to their questions.
Read the full story here.
May 6th, 2013
Wall Street Journal
May 5, 2013
Opinion
While the shale boom lifts Texas, California sits on vast resources.
Texas and California have been competing for years as U.S. growth models, and one of the less discussed comparisons is on energy. The Golden State has long been one of America’s big three oil producing states, along with Texas and Alaska, but last year North Dakota surpassed it. This isn’t a matter of geological luck but of good and bad policy choices.
Barely unnoticed outside energy circles, Texas has doubled its oil output since 2005. Even with the surge in output in North Dakota’s Bakken region, Texas produces as much oil as the four next largest producing states combined. The Lone Star State now pumps nearly two million barrels a day, and Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman (who is also oil commissioner) says “total production could double by 2016 and triple by the early 2020s.” The entire U.S. now produces about seven million barrels a day.