Marketers appeal refiners' ban on ethanol blending to state's Supreme Court

摘要

Marketers will ask the Supreme Court of South Carolina to resuscitate a state law that would allow jobbers to blend their own ethanol fuels, Oil Express learns. In an amicus brief that is to be filed next week, jobbers will argue that BP and the American Petroleum Institute failed to show how they would be hurt if they were required to supply marketers with conventional gasoline for blending, in accordance with state law. South Carolina legislators passed a measure in late June that required suppliers to make an unblended gasoline available at terminals in the state, overriding a veto by Republican Gov. Mark Sanford. BP and API immediately asked the state Supreme Court to set the law aside, saying it violated a state constitutional requirement that every act or regulation should relate to just one subject that must be named in the bill's title. The act legislators passed referred to three different tax credit issues, one of which was fuel blending. If the state Supreme Court does not restore the law. distributors will not have access to a feedstock that will allow them to make their own E10 and refiners will be able to monopolize the market and the 5.1cts/gal federal tax credit that goes with it.