EPA releases data on canola biodiesel pathway

Biodiesel Magazine
August 2010
By Luke Geiver
Posted July 20, 2010

The U.S. EPA has released a Notice of Data Availability (NODA) for its recent modeling of the canola oil biodiesel pathway. As of March 26, when the EPA officially announced the final rule for the revised renewable fuel standard (RFS2), the canola pathway had not been analyzed as a biofuel feedstock capable of meeting the required greenhouse gas reduction standards set by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Using the same RFS2 lifecycle analysis modeling approach for other biofuels already approved, the EPA stated that the canola oil biodiesel pathway creates a 50 percent reduction in GHG emissions compared to the diesel fuel baseline.

“These results, if finalized, would justify authorizing the generation of biomass-based diesel RINs for fuel produced by the canola oil biodiesel pathway modeled, assuming that the fuel meets the other definitional criteria for renewable fuel (e.g., produced from renewable biomass, and used to reduce or replace transportation fuel) specified in EISA,” EPA said in the NODA memo.

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