Diesel is $6.30 a gallon and the White House answer to go dye.
The executive order lets highway truckers burn red-dyed off-road fuel without federal penalty.
The stupid. It burns.
Red dye is the same petroleum diesel with the tax marker removed. The federal excise is 24.4 cents a gallon, under 4 percent of the pump price, and the order only defers it to year end with a request that Treasury find a way to forgive it later. State excise averages 35.5 cents and stays. State troopers keep their authority over red fuel on the road.
The order literallt adds zero gallons of supply. ZERO.
CNBC quotes Andy Lipow of Lipow Oil Associates saying every administration lacks good options because the bottleneck is refineries. His fix is to stop war.
A bit rich for an Oil man to say there should be no war.
The bottleneck is a choice, that’s for certain. Way back 21 years ago in October 2005, when a Gulf refinery outage spiked diesel, I wrote that Rudolf Diesel designed his engine to run without dependence on foreign petroleum and the corporations controlling it. Two weeks later I wrote that the military should field vehicles without vulnerable fueling convoys following them around, and then that Green Berets already preferred biodiesel, with Camp Pendleton running its fleet on mess-hall waste oil. In December 2005 a Special Forces source explained the reason: a biodiesel tank can not be weaponized by an IED. In 2006 I reported the Navy mandated diesel as the less dangerous fuel. In 2008 my own car ran six months on a field-scale plant. In 2010 Yahoo! converted its employee fleet to a biodiesel blend and I drove an entire year in Silicon Valley using its cafeteria waste oil.
Biodiesel never enters a refinery. Transesterification of soy, canola or waste oil happens in a plant with no hydrocracker and no crude feed. I used to run it in my garage. The Strait of Hormuz sets no price on it. Every gallon displaces a gallon of the refinery bottleneck the analysts call unsolvable.
Twenty-one years of documented warnings and the federal response to record diesel in a Gulf war is a tax IOU. I’m not going to dye for this administration and neither should you.
Lipow says end conflict. Rudolf Diesel ran his engine on peanut oil at the 1900 Paris Exposition and predicted vegetable oils would in time matter as much as petroleum.
For two decades I watched Washington let the biodiesel credit lapse, ignore Pentagon innovations, and hand refineries waivers from the blending mandate, while the engines stayed hostage to foreign crude.