Fourteen months ago, during a U.S. Senate hearing on the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), EPA was asked to explain how it decides how much ethanol will be blended into the nation's fuel supply each year under the agency's RFS authority. You can read about that conversation here, but the gist of the exchange is that EPA's RFS assumptions are largely based on subjective judgments about consumers and the fuels marketplace.

The history of the RFS is that EPA's enthusiasm for the program has seen the agency mandate ever-increasing volumes of ethanol in the fuel supply, potentially putting consumers at risk by pushing fuels into the marketplace that could damage the engines of vehicles, motorcycles, boats and small power equipment. At the same time the RFS' original purpose of developing a commercially viable, national supply of cellulosic biofuel has become submerged in a growing ocean of corn ethanol.

In short, that's where America and the RFS stand today after EPA recently issued ethanol requirements for 2017 that could breach the refining blend wall†the point at which the RFS forces more ethanol into the fuel supply than can be safely blended as the E10 gasoline that's standard across the country.

API calculates the 2017 volumes would put the ethanol-to-gasoline ratio at 10.4 percent. That's higher than the 9.7 percent recommended by API both to avoid crashing through the blend wall and to preserve a place in the overall supply for ethanol-free gasoline, which significant numbers of consumers want.

A couple of charts. Below, EPA's ethanol-use requirements since 2014, which shows a steadily climbing government mandate:

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