Year-Round E15 and RIN Reform Proposed The EPA released its proposed waiver for year-round E15 use today. As previously reported (click here), it will now be on a tight approval deadline before the summer driving season starts. Given the risk of regulatory uncertainty and needed infrastructure investments, the waiver will likely have a muted effect initially on ethanol use. Where E15 infrastructure already has a market hold in places such as Minnesota and, to a lesser extent, in Iowa, growth could be substantial on a percentage basis. For the overall U.S. market, though, the bigger impact would probably not be seen immediately this summer. E15 use in 2018 hit 54 million gallons in Minnesota, up from 19 million gallons in 2017. Approximate...
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.
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...