Drought Intensifies Ethanol Mandate Debate

The summer drought is hammering crops across the country, but corn harvests are being stretched exceptionally thin due to the ethanol mandate that diverts roughly 40 percent of the national crop into gasoline blends for alternative fuels.

Members of both houses of Congress are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to lower or eliminate the mandate for grain-based ethanol as the worst drought in a generation withers corn crops across the Midwest.

Twenty-five U.S. senators urged EPA chief Lisa Jackson on August 7 to adjust the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) that will require 13.2 billion gallons of ethanol to be blended into the nation's gasoline this year. The mandate is scheduled to rise until reaching a 15 billion gallon annual total in 2015, where it will stay through 2022

Roughly 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is now dedicated to ethanol for fuel, though some byproducts of the process are reused to feed livestock. The drought has caused a 50 percent surge in corn prices, to a record of more than $8 a bushel.

Critics of the fuel and accompanying mandate vary, from oil companies that resent government-sponsored competition to environmentalists who protest the deforestation that massive corn harvests require.

The Outdoor Power Equipment Institute recently protested to a gasoline blend approved by the EPA that contains 15 percent ethanol, due to insufficient warnings against the fuel?EUR??,,????'???s damaging effects on the small engines in lawn and landscaping power tools.

None of the senators opposing the mandate are from a major corn growing state, where the RFS remains popular with farmers and ethanol distillers for the jobs it supports. Last week, 150 members of the U.S. House of Representatives also signed a letter urging the EPA to ease the mandate, which the agency can adjust unilaterally.

''Adjusting the corn grain-ethanol mandate of the RFS can offer some relief from tight corn supplies and high prices,'' said the senators, including Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, and Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican.

The EPA refused a similar petition from Texas governor Rick Perry under similar circumstances in 2008, stating that movement on the mandate will only come if the petitioner can prove the mandate is causing direct and severe economic harm.