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CMR FAC | Signs Point to a Bullish Biofuels Policy · Closing Market Report

• 0:00
  Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is a special edition of the Closing Market Report. Presentations from the twenty twenty five Farm Assets Conference, Signs Point to a Bullish Biofuels Policy. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleeson. The agricultural industry is currently witnessing a significant shift in U. S.
• 0:22
  Biofuels policy driven by evolving political priorities and a rapidly changing market landscape. In this presentation recorded December 12, Scott Irwin, the Lawrence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing at the University of Illinois, provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of the biofuels sector focusing on the recent boom in renewable diesel and the policy measures designed to support domestic production. Here's Scott Irwin.
• 0:51
  Scott Irwin: So here's where we're going to start. First, a little bit about terminology. Most of my presentation is gonna be about biodiesel and renewable diesel. Okay? Which jointly are referred to as biomass based diesel or BPD.
• 1:18
  So when you hear me say these three abbreviations, you'll know what I'm talking about. Okay? BD is biodiesel, RD is renewable diesel, and BBD is biomass based diesel, which is largely the combination of BD and RD. You all with me? Or they're saying, oh, this is gonna be too hard.
• 1:51
  Get the next speaker fast. Trust me, you're gonna have some interesting insights. Okay. So what has happened in the last five years is a boom in real renewable diesel production capacity and production in The United States. This chart shows renewable diesel production capacity and its stratospheric climb since 2021.
• 2:24
  Basically, in the last five years, we have added 4,000,000,000 gallons of annual capacity in renewable diesel in The United States. An enormous boom, and we could talk about the reasons for that if I had a longer time slot. But basically, this is driven by California, and I'll leave it at that. All those new renewable diesel plants require feedstock. And the feedstock that goes into renewable diesel, just like biodiesel, is vegetable oils, like soybean oil, which is the interest here in Illinois, and fats like tallow, yellow grease, use cooking oil.
• 3:25
  Okay? Those are the those are the feed stocks. And so everybody could see the plants being built. We're going to use a whole bunch more soybean oil as a part of this increased feedstock demand coming from renewable diesel plants. So we need to build a bunch of new soybean crushing facilities.
• 3:47
  We're looking at over these five years on the chart through 2026 about a one third increase in soybean crushing capacity in The US. This is the reason that all those plants have been built. We haven't built a new soybean crushing plant in The US until very recently for the pretty much the last thirty years. So this is a big development. So we've had this big boom.
• 4:25
  We're building feedstock production supply chains to go along with that. Everything's good. Right? Wrong. In 2024 and '25, we started to see headlines like this.
• 4:43
  Renewable diesel glut hits US refiner profits threatens nascent industry. Chevron idles two US Midwest biodiesel plants as profits slip. What in the world? It was all supposed to be golden good times. How did this happen?
• 5:04
  Well, that's what I put together this chart to explain. And it's a simple old story of a expansion in production capacity getting out over its skis. The renewable diesel boom, went boom too long. And you can see it directly in this chart. The blue line is the demand for BBD, there's that acronym again, biomass based diesel, and you can compute that from the mandates from The US renewable fuel standards.
• 5:54
  We're gonna get into that in a few minutes. And then the red bar, is the supply. And you can see back in 2,022, when we were in the real fever stage of the renewable diesel boom, we had a a shortage. But by 2023, remember all those plants getting built, production began outpacing demand. Got worse in 2024, and consequently, biomass based diesel prices crashed and their profits crashed.
• 6:38
  And the plants to be dialed back in terms of their production levels and some closing like the biodiesel plants I showed you on the slide. We get to 2025, it looks like a really happy situation where demand is far outpacing supply, but that's just simply the industry trimming its sales trying to get supply and demand back in better balance. It's like cutting back corn acres because we've got a 3,000,000,000 bushel carry out. That's what's going on in 2025 in the BB and T sector. So that's the kind of just a quick history of where we've been.
• 7:27
  And I say that as background. This is the context for lots of policy headlines you've probably at least seen in the last six months about biofuels policy in The US. This is what's happened and the Trump administration released three major policy documents or rule makings in the last six months that were designed to address this situation. Okay? Basically, to try to get the BPD sector back on track.
• 8:17
  So in June, not that long ago, in June, the EPA released something called proposed RVOs for two thousand twenty five -twenty six. Just a little background. The US Renewable Fuel Standard or RFS specifies annual mandates for biofuels in The US. And the main ones that are impacted are ethanol, BD and RD, and there are others, but those are the big three. RVO is just the technical name for mandates.
• 9:00
  It stands for renewable volume obligation. If you haven't seen that before, just think mandate. And I grabbed this from the executive summary of the rule making because it was a very critical statement in the document that reflected the changing political priorities in The US with the change in administration regarding biofuels policy. And the key part is the last clause that says the central goal of the policy is supporting domestic production of renewable fuels. Basically, the Biden administration and earlier under the Obama administration, the goals were broader and more focused on climate change and environmental goals.
• 10:03
  The new Trump administration has refocused says we're gonna refocus the RFS on production of domestic production of biofuels. Very important change in policy priorities. So here's the numbers that they released and I'm only going to focus on row number four. The BBD line. Okay?
• 10:35
  These are straight out of the proposal and what you see is we've been running the RVO for BBD 4.5, 4,900,000,000 gallons, 5.4. They were proposing in 2026 to jump that to over 7,000,000,000 gallons and then to seven and a half billion gallons in 2027. As it shows there on the left, the 2026 proposed mandate or RVO represented a 33% increase over 2025 and 2027 represent a 40% increase. So these are large increases by historical standards. And again, the Trump EPA was very upfront.
• 11:34
  The goal was to get the BVD sector back on track and growing again. That's that's the idea. But they threw in addition to the large increase in the RVOs, they threw a curveball that no one saw coming, including myself. And it included something called a half RIN proposal. And that's an awful sounding name, right?
• 12:07
  But it turns out that this is a crucial part of the proposal and I'm going show you leading directly back to soybean producers here in Illinois. So, what's a RIN? That stands for Renewable Identification Number. It is the credit that obligated parties have turn in to demonstrate compliance with the mandates. Okay?
• 12:38
  And they trade for a price. That's all we need to know. But they're the credits that demonstrate compliance. That's all you need to know. And they were proposing the first major change in the definition of these credits since the initiation of the renewable fuel standards back in 2005 and 2007.
• 13:07
  Basically, previous to this proposal, imported biofuel or domestically produced biofuel made from imported feedstock generated the same RIN credit for complying with the standards as domestically produced biofuel from domestic feedstocks. The proposal was, this half written proposal said no longer. Imported fuel and imported feedstock will now only generate half the amount of credits that domestically produce biofuel. That's what I mean by the half RIN credit. And why is that such a big deal?
• 14:05
  That's what the chart shows. The blue shows total volume of feedstock based on my personal calculations that have been used the last three years to meet the BBD mandates for RVOs here in The US. That's the blue. The red bar is the feedstock represented by imported biofuel or imported feedstocks that we have been using. The last three years on average 40% of the feedstock used to fuel the BPD mandates has been imported.
• 14:58
  And the biggest growth in 2023 and 2024 was used cooking oil from China. And you may have heard about that issue. That's why this is a big deal because feedstock imports had been flooding into The US to basically fuel the renewable diesel boom. And obviously, that's a real thorn in the side for, in particular, soybean producers who want it to be domestic soybean oil. And the half RIN proposal was is a direct response to that concern by soybean producers.
• 15:51
  Okay? That's why it's in there. Okay. Now, you think, oh, this is pretty straightforward. We've got the mandates.
• 16:05
  We've got this half RIN proposal. Everything's looking good. Easy, easy street. Sadly not the case. Because of something Again, you're going to see all sorts of obscure policy provisions that I'm going to talk about.
• 16:28
  But they matter to the bottom line of Illinois corn soybean producers and I'm going to prove it. Something called small refinery exemptions or SREs. So let's do a little poll. How many people here have actually ever heard of an SRE? That's really impressive actually.
• 16:52
  You're paying way too much attention to biofuel policy if you know what an SRE is. So what is it? Why are they important? Because I call it the dark cloud that hung over the June rulemaking. So the renewable fuel standards when they were passed in 'five and 'seven in their original form allowed exemptions to be provided for small refineries under 75,000 barrels a day in throughput because of, you know, the administrative costs of complying with the program might have been too burdensome.
• 17:38
  They have to demonstrate something called disproportionate economic hardship in order to get one of these exemptions. All that is pretty straightforward stuff. Right? Okay, small opt out the small guys. Alright.
• 17:55
  However, the first Trump administration used SREs as a backdoor way of cutting the annual mandates or RVOs. Okay? This is interesting. So here's an example I'm going to walk through with you. These are just pretend numbers, but to see what happened.
• 18:20
  Let's say that the mandate or RVO, you had one biofuel, was 15,000,000,000 gallons and you had 150,000,000,000 gallons of petroleum gasoline use. Okay? So the way the mandates are actually imposed are in percentage form. So what's called the fractional RVO would be 10% in my example. It would be 15 divided by 150.
• 18:44
  You all with me on the math? 10%. Okay, you would what's called that fractional RVO at 10% in the final rule making for the compliance year. Okay? Everything is hunky dory.
• 18:58
  But after the compliance year starts, you award 30,000,000,000 gallons of exemptions based on petroleum production or by yeah. Gasoline. You award those 30,000,000,000 gallons of SREs. Here's the trick of all tricks. You keep the 10% fixed and after the fact you remove those 30,000,000,000 gallons from obligation.
• 19:30
  Effectively then, that means that the mandate dropped from 15 to 12,000,000,000 gallons. This caused no end of controversy end court cases in the first Trump administration. And this was the great fear even after those relatively bullish RVOs were released in June that they're gonna do this again. And it would all be for naught. And for BBD, it matters.
• 20:11
  This is some work that I did in a FarmVac Daily article I published last winter that showed what was the economic impact of the SREs granted in this backdoor fashion in the first Trump administration. This is basically the BBD blend rate for The US. And you can see in from 2011 up to 2017, we were on this nice upward trend. We were here above 4%. The SREs hit and it just cratered the BBD industry in The United States.
• 20:54
  Cost the BBD industry billions of dollars and put us on a new trend that we never we didn't get off of it and recover even after the SRE stopped until the renewable diesel boom started. So how SREs would be handled in the second Trump administration? Huge question. Huge question. And it's huge because of the numbers of SREs that are that are now in play.
• 21:33
  So in August, the second major policy decision came out. They said, here's how we're going to handle all these SRE petitions that are outstanding. And they had a huge amount of SREs outstanding because you can imagine something that controversial has been wandering through the courts for the last decade. Got all the way to the supreme court twice. So little obscure fact.
• 22:12
  Why why are we worried about SREs from 2016? Because according to the statutes, the EPA can at any point consider an SRE from the past, the present, the future. They have infinite flexibility legally about when they can award these things. That's why. So we start with the backlog of SREs from 2016 to 2022.
• 22:48
  You can see the highlights there. But the key was there were almost 4,000,000,000 gallons of SREs for 2016 and 2022 that the EPA had to make decisions on. Legally, they had to.
• 23:04
  Todd Gleason: You're listening to a presentation made by Scott Erwin at the Farm Assets Conference. Let's continue now with the second half of the Farm Assets Conference biofuels presentation.
• 23:15
  Scott Irwin: And this is another this this is my favorite part of all the policy stuff because I like to use my favorite biofuel word, in this. So the EPA awarded those 4,000,000,000 gallons of SREs. That could be a huge problem for the BBD industry. I mean, you just looked at the annual RVOs around 7,000,000,000 gallons and you just dump 7,000,000,000 credits on the market. I mean, it's easy to see how devastating that would be.
• 23:57
  What they did is they gave the RIN credits back to these small refiners for 4,000,000,000 of them. But they gave back the original RINs that had already expired worthless. They had requested new RINs that could actually be used in the market. These guys are mad. Hopping mad.
• 24:31
  This will go to the courts because billions of dollars are at stake. It affects the stock price of some of these companies that made these. So that was really interesting. That helps. At least for the time being, it wiped off 4,000,000,000 gallons of problem.
• 24:55
  But then in 2000, we have 2023 to 24 to deal with. They made, they awarded a total volume smaller of 1,400,000,000 gallons, which in November was subset bluntly upped a little bit. Now this is where things get interesting. The remedy, they allowed reccompliance for 2023 and they could include these in 2024 compliance. These affect the market.
• 25:33
  Every reasonable to expect that the EPA will award a similar amount of SREs for '25, '26 and '27 when we get around to doing all that. And basically, if you add up the 1,400,000,000 gallons for '23 through '27, that's five years, That's another 7,000,000,000 gallons. What's gonna happen with those 7,000,000,000 gallons? Oh, I forgot. My my my favorite word.
• 26:06
  The remedy up here. What the refiners were asking for are called zombie RINs. It's a real thing. The zombie RINs are your original RINs where the EPA has magically said you get a new expiration date. That's the term Zombie RINs.
• 26:32
  They denied the Zombie RIN request. So we've got but here's the big issue. We've got 7,000,000,000 gallons of these SREs at play. This introduces the third major policy decision before we can get to what all this means for soybean farmers here in Illinois. Something called reallocation.
• 26:59
  How many people have heard about reallocation? Fewer. I'm you don't count Rod. So the question is I mean, 7,000,000,000 gallons, that's one year of the BBD band aid. The idea is the next political fight, what do we do with the 7,000,000,000 gallons?
• 27:26
  In the Trump administration, the BBD industry just ate it. But there's something called reallocation where you in essence take those 7,000,000,000 gallons of exemptions that you provided to the smaller guys and you say, oh, we're just gonna dump it on the big guys. So here's an example of how reallocation works with my previous example. The numbers are the same but now we expect 30,000,000,000 gallons of SREs to be awarded, which is roughly 3,000,000,000 RIN gallons. But you see what you do?
• 28:11
  In the calculation of that fractional percentage, you take into account the SREs. So the base is a 120,000,000,000 gallons, but 15 stays constant. So the fractional RVO is now 12 and a half percent instead of 10%. And the 12 and a half percent is what is applied to all the non small refiners and obligated parties. Take a guess.
• 28:49
  Do you think the big refiners are happy about that? No. This is another place where trench warfare of biofuels policy takes place in Washington DC. And there's a big battle over reallocation of SREs that have been awarded. And the EPA, in their official rulemaking document, this is such a hot potato politically in Washington DC, they issued a rulemaking but said, we haven't made a final decision yet.
• 29:28
  We could go anything from zero to a 100% but we're gonna focus on a hundred percent and fifty percent scenarios. So they haven't made final decisions yet. So the SREs from '23 to '25, I think it's safe to say will be either 100% reallocated or 50% reallocated But a big one is any that are offered for '26 and '27 will be fully reallocated in those percentages. This is overall, it may seem like, oh my gosh, that's the most boring amount of material I've ever seen since I sat in high school algebra. But this is overall a big win for ag, the way this is playing out so far.
• 30:24
  Big win. So now we're gonna talk get to the market implications. Now I do have to refer refer to my notes. Okay. So think about this.
• 30:42
  You got all the stuff I've just spent. How long am I how am I going to time?
• 30:47
  Todd Gleason: To the top there.
• 30:49
  Scott Irwin: I'm gonna go a
• 30:50
  Todd Gleason: little longer than that time.
• 30:53
  Scott Irwin: I I just wanted to Five people behind. Okay. I'll I'll go fast. What does this mean economically? I spent all fall with a colleague at Oklahoma State named Todd Hubbs.
• 31:09
  Some of you may have seen him speak when he was a member of the Farmback Dean. Here at the University of Illinois, he's now at Oklahoma State And we have done a lot of economic analysis to try to figure out what does this mean. And again, since Todd says I only have five minutes and I'm going take 10, This is what it means. These are our estimates of total feedstock use for these new RVOs. And the total feedstock use we project to go up 8,000,000,000 pounds, that's plus 20% in '26 and fifty percent over the 2023 through 2025 levels in 2027.
• 32:08
  Okay? But that's not even the most striking finding. Domestically, the increases are huge. We're looking at a 68% increase in domestic feedstock use in '26 and over a 200% increase in 2027. Huge increases.
• 32:33
  The reason? Half ren. The half ren does exactly what it was designed to do. It skews the feedstock used to fulfill the mandates to domestic sources and imports go down a lot. So what does this mean?
• 32:58
  To give you some perspective, USDA put out some data in '2 earlier in 2025 about the total supply of fats and oils in the world. And they said it was around a 129,000,000,000 pounds of the fats and oils that can go into, BBD. And look at that comparison. By 2027, we are going to be just under half of the feedstock, fats and oils in the world, will go to you to feed The US BPD machine in 2027 is our estimate. It's even more dramatic for domestic.
• 33:48
  USDA estimated that the domestic supply of fats and oils is around £80,000,000,000. We're going to be using over 60% of that to make BBD in 2027 if these proposals are verified. An astonishing increase from 22,000,000,000 to almost £50,000,000,000 and over 60%. So the potential market implications of this are rather dramatic. Scott?
• 34:18
  Can I ask
• 34:18
  conference attendee 2: you a quick question?
• 34:20
  Scott Irwin: No. I don't have enough time.
• 34:21
  Todd Gleason: Oh, never mind. I just Go ahead. For clarification, Speke, this is mandated by the advanced part of the biofuels?
• 34:30
  Scott Irwin: Yeah. Okay.
• 34:31
  Todd Gleason: So it is is it it I'm I'm trying to figure out why if it's so large that companies would would go ahead and do it if if it might not be in there. I mean, they're gonna be opposed financially or is it in their financial interest?
• 34:45
  Scott Irwin: Basically, the RIN price will adjust have to be much higher to incentivize all this.
• 34:52
  That's that's bottom line. What's this gonna mean for soybean prices? Gotta remember we're in uncharted waters here, folks. We are in uncharted waters. We have enough domestic feedstock to do this.
• 35:10
  For example, The US produces about 30,000,000,000 pounds of soybean oil. We have been using about 12 to 13,000,000,000 pounds for biofuel. We're going to have to use a much bigger chunk of that 30,000,000,000 to make PPD. This proposal is finalized, which means other users are either gonna have to quit, but use the same feedstocks for feed, fuel, and industrial uses, or they're the ones that are gonna have to import. Basically, what's gonna happen is we're gonna go through a scenario at a very large scale of robbing Peter to pay Paul in terms of feedstock markets.
• 35:52
  And the question is, though, in the short run, where do feedstock prices have to go to get all this reshuffling done? It could be very disruptive. Soybean oil prices currently around 50¢ a pound. Todd and I think that these are conservative estimates of where soybean oil prices might go if this proposal is finalized. Up 10¢ and up 15¢.
• 36:27
  So basically 60 to 75¢ a pound. If you really cornered us, we think that this is conservative. Worked out some estimates without getting into how we did this. It's some new research I'm working on. At 10¢ a pound, the crush value of soybeans is a dollar 10.
• 36:55
  11 pounds of soybean oil per bushel of soybeans. Got that? So soybean oil prices go up 10¢, the crush value of oil for soybeans goes up a dollar 10. Does all that dollar 10 end up back in soybean producers pockets in terms of higher soybean prices? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
• 37:19
  Because if you're going to produce more soybean oil, you get more soybean meal. And so we lose roughly a quarter of the increase in soybean oil value to lower soybean meal prices. And the one that this research has helped me really see is when you're pushing soybean crushing towards its maximum, you're kind of bottlenecked, And it shouldn't be any surprise that crush margins go up substantially as well. And so the crushers are capturing a big chunk and leaving roughly 50 to 80¢ for soybean producers. So if you ask me a reasonable range of what this proposal means, roughly 50¢ to a dollar added to soybean prices where they are today if this proposal is finalized.
• 38:23
  That's that's a big deal. But most of that depends on that obscure half RIN proposal that I talked about. There is clearly an effort, lobbying effort, to try to get the half RIN removed from the final rulemaking, which was supposed to have been released already, but they've delayed it because it's such a hot political potato over this half RIN business. And this shows our estimates of how much lower domestic feedstock use will be without the half RIN. It'll be substantially less bullish for soybean producers and prices if that half RIN proposal does not is not included in the final proposal.
• 39:18
  So that's I'm going to talk one more thing.
• 39:24
  Todd Gleason: You're good.
• 39:25
  Scott Irwin: You're good. Alright. One more thing. All of this, and I do appreciate you hanging with me. I know, make high school geometry look good.
• 39:42
  The 45z clean fuels tax credit has one of the most interesting market implications I have seen in a long time. Do I have your attention? Yes. At least Todd. Okay.
• 40:04
  What is it? We had a dollar a gallon blenders tax credit for biodiesel seemingly forever. So if you blended biodiesel with diesel you got a buck as a tax credit on your federal taxes if you were a company that blended biodiesel. That was replaced by the 45z CFPT Clean Fuels Production Tax Credit in the IRA Act of 2022 to go into effect in 2024. Okay?
• 40:45
  But it was modified in a very crucial way in the July reconciliation bill, known by its acronym, OOBA, One big beautiful act. And those modifications are very interesting. Number one, to gain access to this new clean fuels production tax credit, the feedstock has to be North American, which means just US feedstocks plus canola from Canada. It now applies to all biofuels including ethanol and SAF. That was in the original legislation.
• 41:42
  Okay? The previous dollar gallon was only biodiesel renewable diesel. This new credit applies to everybody. Preferential cap for SAF was eliminated after 2025. I always have to put my 2¢ in on SAF.
• 42:00
  I'm a big bear on SAF. It's not going anywhere in The US until we mandate it. Simple as that. Okay. Here's the key.
• 42:09
  This is the good stuff. The credits for 45z are keyed to carbon intensity scores, the previous panel talked a lot about. And I've been using the latest GREET model that has been released by the Department of Energy to come up with these numbers. A Midwest soybean oil biodiesel plant is expected starting in 2026 to get 61¢ a gallon. If you're a California RD plant using tallow, you're gonna get 68¢.
• 42:49
  So these guys are getting less than they got before. The Midwest Corn Ethanol Plant, here's a key mind boggling number of acronyms. Right? CCS. Anybody know what CCS stands for?
• 43:10
  What? Excellent. You are a winner. Bingo. Carbon capture.
• 43:19
  It's carbon sequestration. If you're a Midwest corn ethanol plant and you haven't done CCS, you're gonna get 11¢ per gallon of ethanol produced. And if you get rid of all your CO2, my calculation is 94¢ a gallon. As Todd says, you wonder why we're building pipelines and who's going to pay for it. Right there.
• 43:49
  Okay, here's where things get really interesting. Now the people in the BVD industry hate when I say this, but I'm 99.9999% I'm correct. No impact. Okay, Biodiesel and RD is gonna get less of a tax credit than they got before. But it does not matter economically because the RIN price and the tax credit move opposite.
• 44:21
  You lower the tax credit, the RIN price goes up and we're at the same place. Oh, but here's here's my my big drum low please. This is this is the big moment in the presentation, Todd. For an ethanol plant starting on 01/01/2026, I'm assuming no CCS. The RIN price is irrelevant in this case.
• 44:51
  There's no offset. 11¢ times 2.5 2.95 gallons of ethanol per bushel is 32¢ per bushel of corn. In little over two weeks, at least from an economic standpoint, pretty much every ethanol plant in The US has just had a helicopter of cash flown in over the Corn Belt, and it's dropping 32¢ of cash per bushel of corn they're buying. I think farmers might be interested in how that 32¢ might be shared. What?
• 45:50
  Well, this is going to be, I think, something that is going to bust out that I can't find anybody else thinking about it, quite frankly, but myself. I think ethanol plants know this, and I don't think that they really want it publicized. But it's out there, and it's gonna be a big issue in negotiating prices with ethanol plants. I mean, think about it. You know they're getting this.
• 46:27
  And for 32¢, I could ship corn all over Illinois to somebody who will share 15 or 20¢ with me. So watch the basis at ethanol plants after the first of the year. I think it's gonna be incredibly interesting. It's a I I can't really ever recall this much money being at play on a given date. Now with CCS, it's a ridiculous number.
• 47:10
  $2.77 a bushel corn. But that's maybe I shouldn't even put that number up there because to get a lower CI score and a bigger credit, you have to spend money. So this will this is the gross amount. And but still and I do. I am I market the grain for our farms in Iowa, and we sell grain to a local ethanol plant.
• 47:41
  I'm going to be having a phone call with their buyer after the first of the year. And I'm going to ask them these questions. And I suspect they're going to be not happy to have that conversation, but they're going to have it me. And I recommend every farmer have the same conversation.
• 47:58
  Todd Gleason: You're gonna share that with everybody, right? That conversation you have with your local corn fire at the ethanol plant?
• 48:06
  Scott Irwin: What a planning on it.
• 48:09
  Todd Gleason: Don't worry, I'm recorded.
• 48:12
  Scott Irwin: So I got my five minutes. I'm done. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate. I was really worried this presentation. I'm thinking this is going to go terrible with all this junk in here.
• 48:25
  But I deeply appreciate that you guys all hung in there with me. Thank you very much.
• 48:36
  Todd Gleason: Any questions, perhaps? Yes, sir. Hang on. Let me get these on. It's all on record.
• 48:42
  I am recording this too.
• 48:44
  conference attendee 1: Just real quick. When is the final ruling on the Haprin taking place?
• 48:51
  Scott Irwin: Where is that voice? Oh, thank you. When? I don't know, which is the typical answer out of DC. The the rumor mill suggest at the earliest sometime in January, latest March, maybe even April, which I think is near criminal to delay something this important that long because it has a big market impact.
• 49:26
  They need to get it out now so everybody knows what they're dealing with.
• 49:32
  conference attendee 2: Yes. Okay. Over here. So that's a tax credit. And we all know that tax credits to me are worth more 32¢ tax credit is worth probably $60.70 cents after taxes.
• 49:53
  Scott Irwin: I see where you're going, but this is just a pure cash. In terms of the price impact, it should be just the $0.32 Okay. Okay? But I see where you're going but just think $0.30 Keep a nice round number when you have that conversation. Buy me buy me a steak dinner later.
• 50:15
  All up, all done? One more.
• 50:20
  conference attendee 3: Wouldn't this be a real expansion of the ethanol business? I mean, the the ability to have that cash in hand and profitable. Isn't it a bonanza to make ethanol is what I'm saying, wouldn't it? I mean, wouldn't it shouldn't we be seeing ethanol expansion?
• 50:39
  Scott Irwin: I I I I think it's possible, but, you know, that's a real long run process. You know, to expand takes three or four years. Now you can maybe do something thinking of an expansion of a plant, but new plants are three or four years. And even expanding is, I would say at least a couple years. So but I would guess, you know, the domestic market for ethanol is not gonna grow no matter what you do here.
• 51:09
  Okay? E15. Other than E15. If we keep the blend rates where they are now, the domestic market is likely to decline in the next five to ten years. I know Colin doesn't like me to say that but it is true if the blend rate doesn't change.
• 51:27
  But where I think this will probably could still have some expansion possibilities is what the previous panel talked about at the exports. This might in essence pay for the expansion of the production of ethanol from The US for a bigger export market. And and you could see why if you ever thought, why are those guys out in Iowa and South Dakota and Minnesota spending $2,000,000,000 for a stupid pipeline. It doesn't take long when you see those numbers, does it? See why that makes
• 52:10
  Todd Gleason: rejected it so they've not spent it.
• 52:13
  Scott Irwin: No. They've spent about a billion dollars so far, but they haven't got a bill yet. Yeah. So, anyway, that's what's going on.
• 52:21
  Todd Gleason: Okay. Give him another round of applause. Thank you. You've been listening to Scott Erwin's presentation made at the PharmAssets Conference in Bloomington on '12. It was entitled Signs Point to a Bullish Biofuels Policy.
• 52:39
  You can hear it again if you'd like on our website at wilag.org. That's willag.org. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason.