Federal Biofuel Mandate Adds Up To 37 Cents To Every Gallon Of Fuel, Estimates Show

The federal biofuel mandate adds between roughly 7 cents and 37 cents to every gallon of fuel Americans buy, according to government and think tank estimates.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put the mandate’s cost at 6.8 cents a gallon for gasoline and 18.6 cents for diesel in 2026 in a proposed rule it published Oct. 16. Both figures compare prices to what they would be with no mandate.

The diesel figure “adds roughly $75 – $85 per week to our members’ fuel bill,” a spokesperson for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), which represents small-business truckers, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“OOIDA opposes the federal biofuel mandate because it is a needless expense that neither delivers safer roads nor does anything meaningful to improve the lives of America’s small business truckers,” the spokesperson said.

Max Pyziur, research director at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, said in a statement to the DCNF that the think tank’s original method puts the cost at about 37 cents a gallon at the latest credit prices.

Over a year, “this implies about $74 billion based on annual consumption of about 140 billion gallons of gasoline and almost 60 billion gallons of diesel,” he said.

The foundation is rethinking that method, which Pyziur described as “particularly aggressive (but not the most aggressive)” compared with other estimates. The foundation gets 27 cents a gallon when it borrows parts of a less aggressive method from a commodity consultancy, Pyziur said.

“This still implies a cost of $54 billion annually,” he said. “In the end, the cost is passed on to consumers.”

Under the mandate, known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), refiners and importers have to blend biofuels such as corn ethanol and biodiesel into the fuel they sell. Each gallon of biofuel comes with a credit, and a company that blends too little has to buy credits from one that blended more.