Almost a year after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
proposed new regulations for the National Renewable Fuel
Standard (RFS) program for 2010 and beyond, the agency has taken
thousands of comments into consideration and released a more soy
oil friendly, albeit complicated, program that establishes new
annual volume levels of renewable fuels to be used in
transportation fuel. The rule makes changes to the program as
required by the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of
2007 and will apply to domestic and foreign producers and
importers of renewable fuel used in the United States. The
biodiesel industry excitedly welcomed the new rule, known as
RFS2, because not only does it put in place yearly volume
requirements, but also addressed the industry’s concern over
EPA’s life cycle analysis (LCA) of soy oil. In the proposed
rule, EPA calculated that biodiesel produced from soy oil
reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 22 percent compared to
petroleum diesel, while biodiesel produced from waste