(Bloomberg) — Renewable-fuels advocates are promising to
spend millions putting ethanol back in the debate for Iowa’s
first-in-the-nation caucus next year as cheap oil and setbacks
in biofuels policy make the additive less central to voters.
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, backed by state corn-grower
and renewable-fuels associations and the Washington-based
biofuels lobby Growth Energy, on Thursday formed America’s
Renewable Future, to make the Renewable Fuels Standard an issue
in the 2016 race. The Iowa caucus is set for early January.
“We are designing it to look like a presidential campaign,
but the RFS is our candidate,” said Eric Branstad, the
governor’s son and a group organizer. “We’re going to be
talking to people” and making the presidential candidates
respond, he said on a conference call.
Ethanol companies are wrestling with prices near a 10-year
low as crude oil and gasoline plunge. The need to lobby in the
nation’s No. 1 producing state contrasts with a time when
support was automatic, said Dee Davis, president of the Center
for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
“We’re a country awash in cheap energy right now,” Davis
said in a telephone interview. “The marketplace is not being
kind to them, so they need to increase the drumbeat for their
policies at a time when fewer people care as much about them.”
Ethanol was pushed to help farmers cope with low corn
prices more than a decade ago. Domestic production has climbed
88 percent since a 2007 law to boost use of renewable fuels,
Energy Department data show.
The pace of growth has slowed and Congress has declined to
renew the subsidies. Projections for using more so-called
cellulosic ethanol never materialized. Gasoline pump prices at
the lowest since April 2009 make ethanol less desirable.
Denatured ethanol for February delivery on the Chicago
Board of Trade this month fell to the lowest price since June
2005. Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., in Chicago, is the largest
U.S. ethanol producer, followed by Poet LLC, in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota, and San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corp.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Alan Bjerga in Washington at
abjerga@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Jon Morgan at
jmorgan97@bloomberg.net
Steve Geimann