Regulation of Fuels and Fuel Additives: Renewable Fuel Standard ...

producer would need to report the volumes that were not assigned a RIN to the EPA in its
annual RFS report, along with the connection to exports, in order to demonstrate that
RINs were legitimately not assigned to these batches. We request comment on these
special-case approaches to exported renewable fuels.
As described in Section III.D.2, there are cases in which there is not a one-to-one
correspondence between gallons in a batch of renewable fuel and the RINs generated for that
batch. For instance, extra-value RINs can be generated in cases where the Equivalence
Value is greater than 1.0. If the RVO assigned to the exporter were based strictly on the
actual volume of the exported product, it would not capture the extra-value RINs which
generally are not assigned to batches. Thus we propose that the RVO assigned to an exporter
be based not on the actual volume of renewable fuel exported, but rather on a volume
adjusted by the Equivalence Value assigned to each batch. The Equivalence Value is
represented by the RR code within the RIN as described in Section III.D.2.a. Thus the
exporter would multiply the actual volume of a batch by that batch's Equivalence Value to
obtain the volume used to calculate the RVO.
In cases wherein an exporter obtains a batch of renewable fuel whose RIN has already
been separated by an obligated party or blender, the exporter may not know the Equivalence
Value. We propose that for such cases the exporter simply use the actual volume of the batch
to calculate its RVO. This will introduce some small error into the calculation of the RVO
for cases in which the renewable fuel had in fact been assigned an Equivalence Value greater
than 1.0. However, we believe that the potential impact of this error would be exceedingly
small. We request comment on our proposed approach to exporters of renewable fuel and
any alternative approaches that could ensure that production volumes of renewable fuel can
be used as an accurate surrogate for consumed volumes.
5. How Would The Agency Verify Compliance?
The primary means through which the Agency would verify an obligated party's
compliance with its RVO would be the annual reports. These reports would include a variety
of information required for compliance and enforcement, including the demonstration of
compliance with the previous calendar year's RVO, a list all transactions involving RINs, and
the tabulation of the total number of RINs owned, used for compliance, transferred, retired
and expired. Reporting requirements for obligated and non-obligated parties are covered in
detail in Section IV.
In its annual reports, an obligated party would be required to include a list of all RINs
held as of the reporting date, divided into a number of categories. For instance, a distinction
would be made between current-year RINs and previous-year RINs as follows:
Current-year RINs: RINs that came into existence during the calendar year
for which the report is demonstrating compliance.
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