A meltdown in the ethanol industry has hit the corn market -– adding strains to farmers already facing poor weather and the U.S. trade war with China, reports Reuters.
Some 13 ethanol plants have shut since November 2018, roughly 4.4% of the nation’s capacity, in a decline the biofuel industry blames on the Trump administration’s expanded use of waivers to exempt oil refineries from blending ethanol into gasoline. Several other ethanol plants temporarily reduced production during that time.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the RFS, has handed out roughly four times more exemptions to small refiners than Obama’s EPA.
USDA predicts that around 5.375 billion bushels of corn will be needed for ethanol in the 2019/20 marketing year, a drop of 230 million bushels from two years ago when corn used for ethanol peaked at 5.605 billion bushels.
Read the full report at Reuters.
