WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday will step up efforts to increase the availability of ethanol at filling stations and to speed up subsidies to struggling biofuel producers. But the trade-off is that the administration is also expected to propose a rule that could make certain biofuels look less climate-friendly.
At a news conference led by the heads of the Agriculture Department, Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency, the administration is expected to announce the creation of an interagency group that will be charged with forging a plan to encourage the production of more automobiles that can run on high-level ethanol blends, and increase the availability of high-level ethanol blends at gasoline stations.
President Barack Obama is also expected to direct the Agriculture Department to expedite the awarding of loan guarantees to support the development and construction of more biofuel refineries.
But at the same time, the EPA is expected to propose measuring the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with biofuel production — including emissions that result overseas when farmers world-wide respond to higher food prices by converting forest and grassland to cropland. The EPA decision could undercut the environmental rationale the ethanol industry has used to sustain support for its government subsidies.
In an effort to ease the sting of Tuesday’s announcement, the administration scheduled a news conference to discuss not only the EPA rulemaking but also what it called Mr. Obama’s “commitment to advance biofuels research and commercialization.”
The question of whether biofuels help or harm the climate has been heating up for months in scientific, corporate and environmental circles. A study published last year in the journal Science found that U.S. production of corn-based ethanol increases emissions by 93% compared with using gasoline, when expected world-wide land-use changes are taken into account.
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