The EPA has decided six small refinery exemption petitions and denied none of them, and it has published a finding that sends any challenge to the D.C. Circuit
Zero denials.
The Environmental Protection Agency filed a notice for public inspection at 08.45 Eastern on Tuesday recording the decisions it announced on 3 August on six petitions for small refinery exemptions under the Renewable Fuel Standard. The six came from four refineries and covered the 2023 and 2024 compliance years. One received a full exemption. Two received partial exemptions, which the notice defines as covering half the refinery's obligation, and three were determined to be ineligible rather than decided on their merits.
A small refinery, under the statute the notice cites, is one whose average aggregate daily crude oil throughput for a calendar year does not exceed 75,000 barrels.
The agency reviewed the refineries and changed nothing
The Clean Air Act requires the agency to consider a Department of Energy study and other economic factors. The notice describes how it does that: it treats the Department of Energy's scoring matrix as a rebuttable presumption of the right answer, then looks at facts specific to each refinery to see whether anything displaces that presumption. On this round, nothing did.
The document says so in terms. Its own sentence is that the confirmatory review of refinery-specific facts "did not change the final decision for any of the SRE petitions", and it adds that the information refineries submitted about their financial circumstances was either already captured in the matrix or did not justify departing from it.
Where an appeal has to go
Each of these decisions applies to one refinery, which would ordinarily make it locally or regionally applicable and send any challenge to the regional circuit. The notice takes the other route. It finds that the decisions rest on three determinations of nationwide scope or effect and publishes that finding, which under section 307(b)(1) puts judicial review in the D.C. Circuit, on a clock of 60 days from publication.
The three are that the statute lets the agency find partial hardship and grant a partial exemption at all, that the Department of Energy matrix is a reasonable proxy for whether hardship exists, and that where a refinery has already retired renewable identification numbers to show compliance, handing those same retired credits back is the only lawful way to give the exemption effect. On the third, the notice reasons from a 2023 Fifth Circuit decision and from the agency's concern that issuing current vintage credits instead would push a mass of new supply into the market and depress prices.
The notice was filed on 4 August. It is scheduled to publish on 5 August, and the 60 days run from that.
