Last week the EPA sent its proposed rule on 2020 Required Volume Obligations (RVOs) under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for final review. The proposal provides for modest increases in biofuel volumes. Under the RFS, conventional ethanol is capped at 15 billion gallons. Furthermore, the statute requires the biodiesel-specific RVO to be set 14 months in advance of the compliance year, so the 2.43 billion gallons for 2020 had already been set in November 2018 when the 2019 final volumes were issued for the other categories of fuel (reportedly, the biodiesel volume to be set in this rule for 2021 will stay at 2.43 billion gallons). Based on that extrapolation and leaks from the administration a...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.