Dorgan Says EPA Decision On E15 Needs To Be Moved Ahead
Press Release
U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) said Tuesday he is concerned about the delay of another eight months waiting for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision on whether to allow more ethanol in gasoline blends. He is pushing the EPA and the Department of Energy to move forward quickly to certify E15, which would allow a 15 percent ethanol blend in gasoline.
Dorgan, a senior member of the Senate Energy Committee and chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, said our nation's energy independence would be strengthened by a decision that would allow more Heartland-grown ethanol to be used in place of petroleum products that were imported from other parts of the world.
Dorgan has supported a request from Growth Energy, a group that supports renewable fuels, to allow gasoline blends that contain 15 percent ethanol, often referred to as E15, to be sold at gas pumps around the nation. Currently, gasoline blends can contain no more than 10 percent ethanol. As Chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Dorgan has funded the research to test the effects of E15 on legacy vehicles. In the last two appropriations bills, he has allocated $30 million to this work. The preliminary research has found that E15 is safe to use in vehicles with conventional fuel-combustion engines.
The EPA now says that the preliminary tests are positive for going to an E15 standard, but the decision will have to wait until next August. "That's frustrating," Dorgan said. "But it sounds like this will get done -- hopefully sooner than that timeline."
The EPA was to announce a decision on the matter today, but instead announced that it will not make a decision until next summer.
"We've been using E10 for 20 years now, and we need to move to higher blends if we are to grow our renewable fuels industry and move our country away from dependence on foreign oil," Dorgan said. "EPA needs to get a move on with this decision, and I'm going to keep pushing them to get to a positive conclusion."
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