The Senate confirmed Michael Regan to be Administrator of the U.S. EPA this week by a vote of 66-34. Since 2017, Regan has been Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and previously he worked at EPA in the air office. That experience will come in handy as he has to get the RFS back on track after COVID, delays from the Trump Administration, and the thorny issue of small refinery waivers. In Trump’s final days, EPA proposed to extend the compliance deadlines for refineries to meet their 2019 blending obligations until 30 November 2021 (when the final statutorily prescribed volume obligations are to be issued). The final compliance date for 2020 blending obligations is extended until 21 January 2022...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.