Delaware River and Bay Business Community Urges EPA to Fix the RFS
In a new letter to EPA Administrator Regan, the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay urges EPA to reform the Renewable Fuel Standard before thousands of union jobs disappear in the tristate area
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the rising and increasingly unsustainable costs of compliance under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) threaten the future of the four remaining independent refineries on the East Coast, the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay is urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take swift action to reform the RFS and protect thousands of jobs in the tristate region.
The Maritime Exchange represents port and related businesses in the Delaware River and Bay, an industry that supports more than 75,000 jobs throughout Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In a new letter sent to EPA Administrator Michael Regan this week, Maritime Exchange President Dennis Rochford explains that “the regional port industry supports 135,000 jobs, and each refinery job supports a further 18.3 jobs in our greater community,” but that the skyrocketing costs of compliance credits for the RFS — Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) — put those jobs and the economic vitality of the region at risk.
“RINs prices have fluctuated dramatically over the years and unfortunately, due to a number of complex structural problems with the RFS, the price of these credits has soared to untenable levels. To put this into perspective, the largest refiners in our region — Monroe Energy and PBF have spent billions on RFS compliance costs in the past decade alone. This is an unsustainable cost that represents an existential threat to the continued existence of these facilities,” President Rochford continued. “If the recent cyber-attack on the Colonial Pipeline showed us anything, it was that having refining capacity in regions beyond the gulf coast is critical to our nation’s national and energy security. With only a handful of refineries left in the Northeast, a resolution to this issue is more important now than ever.”
This new letter comes as the Northeast region continues to recover from the gas shortages and other supply chain disruptions resulting from the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. It also comes after labor leaders representing 125,000 workers in Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey sent a letter to EPA last week urging the agency to rein in the growing costs of RFS compliance credits and protect thousands of good-quality jobs in the region.
The EPA is currently considering requests from the National Wildlife Federation and a bipartisan group of U.S. governors — including several letters from Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf and a recent letter from Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards — to waive RFS obligations due to the unprecedented drop in demand for refined products caused by the pandemic.
The Fueling American Jobs Coalition is a coalition of union workers, local gas station owners, small retailers, and independent American oil refiners fighting for a commonsense fix to the EPA’s flawed RFS. The need for significant reform has only grown over the past few years as the cost of purchasing Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) to comply with the RFS has grown increasingly volatile, threatening some refiners’ survival. For additional information, visit www.fuelingusjobs.com.
