The U.S. EPA on Oct. 17 released updated small refinery exemption (SRE) data, reporting that 129 SRE petitions are now pending under the Renewable Fuel Standard, up from 50 as of mid-September. According to EPA data, no new SRE petitions have been filed. Rather, the increase is attributed to submissions from small refineries seeking reconsideration of petitions that were previously denied. 

The EPA in April 2022 denied 36 SRE petitions, including 31 SRE petitions for RFS compliance year 2018 that had previously been approved by the agency. The agency in June 2022 denied an additional 69 SRE petitions that spanned from RFS compliance year 2016 to 2021. The denials were consistent with a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit’s January 2020 decision in Renewable Fuels Association et al. v. EPA. In that ruling, the court said SREs may only be granted when a small refinery’s hardship is caused by compliance with the RFS program. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, however, in July 2024 issued an order vacating most of the SRE petitions denied by the EPA in 2022 and remanding those petitions to the agency for further proceedings. Growth Energy on Sept. 9 filed two petitions for rehearing with the U.S. court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit regarding the court’s SRE decisions. The court on Sept. 17 denied both petitions. The EPA has now begun the process of revaluating the SRE petitions that are subject to the court’s July 2024 order.

The 129 pending SRE petitions now include two for compliance year 2016; one for compliance year 2017; 38 for compliance year 2018; 27 for compliance year 2019; 28 for compliance year 2020; five for compliance year 2021; three for compliance year 2022; 13 for compliance year 2023; nine for compliance year 2024; and three for compliance year 2025.

The EPA’s online SRE data dashboard also includes data on small refineries that have opted into the agency’s alternative renewable identification number (RIN) retirement schedule for the 2020 compliance year. According to the EPA’s online data dashboard, 17 small refineries are participating in the alternative RIN retirement schedule, with the total renewable volume obligation (RVO) for those refineries at 880 million RINs. A total of 540 million RINs have been retired under the alternative retirement schedule as of Oct. 17. The total outstanding RVO is currently at 340 million RINs, according to EPA’s data dashboard. 

Additional data is available on the EPA website.