Trump Plans Biofuel Quota Boost
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The Trump administration is proposing oil refiners blend more biofuels into gasoline and diesel next year while seeking to discourage the use of imported supplies.
The plan being unveiled by the Environmental Protection Agency on June 13 would require refiners to mix a record 24.02 billion gallons of biofuels into traditional transport fuels, according to a news release from the EPA. That would be almost 8% higher than 2025, but short of what some oil companies and biofuel producers were seeking.
The effort marks a bid by President Donald Trump to revamp aspects of the Renewable Fuel Standard program created by Congress two decades ago to raise domestic demand and support rural communities. The proposal advances changes meant to boost US biofuel production and deter imports.
“We are creating a new system that benefits American farmers,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a release. “We can no longer afford to continue with the same system where Americans pay for foreign competitors.”
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It’s the first major milestone for renewable fuel policy under Trump this year, helping shed light on how the president will approach an issue that proved especially controversial during his first term in office, when he struggled to balance demands from then oft-warring oil refiners and ethanol producers.
The administration is so far dodging one of the thorniest issues — whether to grant some small refineries’ bids to be exempted from past years’ quotas. The EPA proposal does not address the topic, or how the agency might account for any waived volumes, according to officials who asked for anonymity because the measure is not yet public.
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The plan would set a 2026 mandate for what the EPA said would amount to 5.61 billion gallons of biomass-based diesel typically made from soybeans and used cooking oil — representing a 67% jump from the 3.35 billion gallons required this year. That’s in line with what a coalition of oil and biofuel groups had sought, though changes in how compliance credits are awarded could affect the 2026 target.
Those interests has also pushed for a higher overall biofuel-blending quota of 25 billion gallons next year. For 2027, the target would also likely remain under that level, with the EPA proposing a quota of 24.46 billion gallons.
Compliance with annual biofuel blending quotas is tracked using credits known as renewable identification numbers. The EPA is proposing to slash the value of those RINs by 50% for biofuels that are imported or made in the U.S. using foreign feedstocks. Roughly 45% of biomass-based diesel and its ingredients came from other countries last year.
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The administration cast the change as promoting domestic biofuel production and aiding American farmers, already on the front lines of Trump’s effort to rebalance trade flows with widespread tariffs. But it will come at the expense of renewable fuel producers with international footprints, potentially lowering the value of the materials they make outside the U.S.
Renewable fuel producers would also be compelled to keep additional records on their purchases or transfers in a bid to thwart the use of fraudulent cooking oil and foreign supplies wrongly labeled as domestic.
The EPA is moving to set biomass-based diesel quotas as RINs, not on a per-gallon basis, and it is seeking to close an opening for electricity to count as a renewable fuel under the program. That would foreclose generating credits from power made from sources such as woody biomass to charge electric vehicles.
