Is Big Oil doing whatever it can to disprove the advantages of Ethanol? President and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association Bob Dinneen, believes it is and he says it’s because they are frustrated that ethanol is taking 10 percent of their barrel.
“If they can’t stop the Renewable Fuel Standard from moving forward it will soon take as much as a third of the barrel and they just don’t think that is where we ought to be going. There are a lot of people who disagree with them, those people being anyone other than the stockholders of Exxon Mobil, but they have been fighting us in the courts. They have been fighting us on Capitol Hill. They are fighting us in the administration seeking waivers from this program, and they are most certainly fighting us in the court of public opinion as well with an ad campaign designed to scare consumers away from the use of ethanol.”
He says they are trying to relitigate the law of the land by taking a case on one issue within the Renewable Fuel Standard to the Supreme Court where it was thrown out. So why is the oil industry trying to undo a program in effect since 2005?
“Just because they’re feeling their political oats and believe that they’ve spent enough money, and indeed $523 million in political campaign contributions from oil companies last year, they believe that they’ve got enough influence now to repeal a program that is to date providing energy security. It is revitalizing rural economies. It is cleaning the nation’s cities from air pollution and it is most importantly lowering the cost of gasoline for consumers at the pump.”
Dinneen says there’s nothing wrong with the RFS. For the oil industry it’s simply a matter of protecting its market share.