Electrify every vehicle? Hold on, say clean fuel backers

Advocates of a national clean fuel standard say it would help cut transportation-sector emissions as electrification ramps up.

 BY: ANDRES PICON

 | 09/27/2022 06:47 AM EDT

CLIMATEWIRE | Electrification is widely regarded as the primary way to tackle vehicle emissions, but there’s a growing push to disrupt that narrative.

Advocates of a national clean fuel standard are rallying around the idea that all clean fuels — not just electricity — should play a role in decarbonizing the high-polluting transportation sector, especially as large trucks, airplanes and ships remain slow to electrify.

A broad range of groups is calling for a clean fuel standard as a way to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles while cultivating a stronger market for low-carbon fuels, from renewable diesel and cellulosic ethanol to clean hydrogen.

“On the light-duty side, we’re all-in on electrification. But what’s nice about [a clean fuel standard] is it goes across vehicle classes,” said Dan Bowerson, senior director of energy and environment at the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.

“There’s a good opportunity here for those hard-to-electrify sectors, where you can actually reduce that carbon intensity as we transition,” he added. “We can still support that transition, and in fact increase the speed or the pace at which we’re going to get there, while at the same time reducing the emissions of all of the vehicles that are on the road today.”

Under the groups' proposed clean fuel standard, the federal government would set a benchmark carbon intensity value for fuels that would drop gradually over time. Producers would earn credits for fuels that have a lower life-cycle carbon intensity and generate deficits for fuels that exceed the benchmark. They could then sell or buy earned credits in a market system.

The Drive Clean Initiative — a group of environmental advocates, renewable energy producers, farmers, vehicle technology firms and others lobbying for a clean fuel standard — released a statement of principles this month. The policy it's proposing would build off of low-carbon fuel standards that already exist in states such as California and Oregon and would be a step up, it says, from EPA’s renewable fuel standard, which advocates say is outdated and not stringent enough.

The standard would provide the market signals needed to shore up American energy independence, spur domestic innovation in clean technologies and unleash the potential of a broader range of sustainable fuels, according to advocates. Those benefits could put the United States in better position to achieve President Joe Biden’s goal of net-zero emissions by midcentury.

Participants in the Drive Clean Initiative have been meeting privately with lawmakers, hoping to get bipartisan support for the policy in the next Congress, said Mary Solecki, a partner at the consulting firm AJW Inc., which is coordinating the initiative.

“While a fairly simple concept at its heart, it’s a somewhat complicated program structure, and so we are not trying to rush this,” said Graham Noyes, executive director of the Low Carbon Fuels Coalition, one of the participants in the initiative. “We want this to appeal to the ag states as well as the EV states on the coasts, so to speak.”

It’s not clear if any lawmakers support the idea. Solecki declined to name the lawmakers the group has been in contact with, and spokespeople for the chairs of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee did not respond to requests for comment.

But Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chair of the EPW Committee, hinted during a panel hearing in February that it may be time to reform the renewable fuel standard, enacted in 2005. EPA has been slow to approve new biofuels through the federal program, he said, and the Clean Air Act prohibits some renewable fuels from qualifying.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the ranking member on the committee, emphasized at the February hearing that liquid fuels will remain an important consideration even as light-duty vehicles become increasingly electrified.

"I can tell you firsthand, liquid fuel is not going away anytime soon in a rural state like West Virginia,“ she said. "Forcing a single-technology approach, such as insisting on 100 percent electric vehicles, disregards this important fact that different communities and businesses have different needs for transportation solutions."

Carper touted technology-neutral, low-carbon fuel standards in Western states as examples of what the federal standard might look like. Those state programs have increased the use of cleaner fuels, stimulated local investments in the fuels and kept consumer prices low, he said.

“We aren’t yet in a post-liquid fuel world,” Carper said at the hearing. “We must retain our domestic capabilities to produce and refine the motor vehicle fuels that power our lives, while also ensuring that these fuels are as clean as possible in order to meet our climate goals.”

Jonathan Lewis, director of transportation decarbonization at the Clean Air Task Force, said EPA’s renewable fuel standard “in practice has mandated the use of the wrong kind of biofuels,” such as vegetable oil-based fuels that can be land-intensive and that do little to reduce emissions.

An ideal policy, he said, would be a zero-carbon fuels standard — as opposed to a low-carbon fuel standard like California's — with built-in guard rails “to prevent over-reliance on problematic feedstocks.”

“If we focus our performance standards on actual performance and carbon intensity as the right metric,” Lewis said, “then we are incentivizing the right thing, we are incentivizing a reduction in carbon intensity, which results in an actual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and we’re not incentivizing corn starch production or soybean production.

“Those are things that we should probably be doing, but we should be doing that through ag policy, not through energy policy,” he added.

Clean fuel advocates have celebrated the Inflation Reduction Act passed last month for its billions of dollars in incentives for clean energy production. It also established new clean-fuel production credits that are performance-based, offering greater rewards for fuels that deliver deeper emissions reductions (Climatewire, Aug. 12).

“We really see with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act a real opening here, because this is the kind of program structure that you ultimately need to get to decarbonization targets,” said Noyes of the Low Carbon Fuels Coalition. “The IRA has a lot of good funding out there, but I think a fuel standard, really longer term, needs to be part of the solution.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2022. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals at www.eenews.net.