Republican Congressman Randy Feenstra of Hull predicts the U.S. Senate will soon pass the E15 bill that cleared the House yesterday.
The margin of the House vote was important, according to Feenstra. “I talked to the Senate leadership last night. They’re really excited because it was a bipartisan measure,” Feenstra said, “so we 120 Republicans support it (and) we had 95 Democrats.”
Feenstra said President Trump and Vice President Vance are using their leverage to push the bill across the finish line. Trump, during a speech in Iowa in January, said he’d sign the bill into law and Vance touted the policy last week during a campaign fundraiser for Iowa Congressman Zach Nunn. “We’ve got the administration pushing it. We also have the Senate leadership pushing it,” Feenstra said. “We’re going to get this thing done and it’s going to become law here very shortly.”
The bill does away with the EPA rule that cites smog concerns as the basis for preventing fuel with a 15% blend of ethanol from being sold during the summer. National Corn Growers. the ethanol industry and the American Petroleum Institute all back the bill, but some refineries object to the bill, arguing it’ll make it harder to get waivers from the federal mandate to blend ethanol into gasoline. “The mid-refiners were playing the system, manipulating the system, did not want to ever go down the E15 or biofuels path,” Feenstra said, “and this now creates an opportunity that they have to.”
The group of U.S. based refineries that object to the bill are owned by foreigners, according to Feenstra. “I’m all about America and about American made domestic energy, so these foreign companies? I don’t care,” Feenstra said. “They were a thorn to us trying to get this passed and I just applaud the biofuels industry and API, which is the large and small refiners that came together and created a solution to finally get this passed.”
The American Petroleum Institute released a statement about the bill, saying “year-round E15 is critical to ensuring certainty and clarity for refineries…while expanding choices at the pump” for consumers.
(Reporting by Carson Schubert, KSOU, Sioux Center and Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson)