EPA publishes proposed rulemaking for sorghum oil pathways

In Washington, D.C., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published their notice of proposed rulemaking for sorghum oil pathways which allows an opportunity to comment on the lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with biofuels that are produced from grain sorghum oil extracted at dry mill ethanol plants. The notice says that the “EPA’s evaluation of the GHG emissions indicates that producing biofuels from distillers’ sorghum oil results in no significant upstream agricultural GHG emissions due to the extraction of oil from sorghum at dry mill ethanol plants.”

Based on these results, biodiesel, renewable diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, naphtha and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) produced from distillers sorghum oil via a transesterification or hydrotreating process would meet the lifecycle GHG emissions reduction threshold of 50 percent compared to the baseline petroleum fuel they would replace as required for advanced biofuels and biomass-based diesel under the Renewable Fuel Standard program. This is exciting news for many sorghum and biofuel producers in the U.S.