The level of small refinery exemptions (SREs) still shown as being pending at EPA has declined dramatically, with the agency data now showing 17 remain pending for the 2011-2018 compliance years as of September 17.
There are two each pending for the 2011, 2012 and 2018 compliance years, three each for 2013 and 2015, four for 2014 and one for the 2016 compliance year.
The big reduction is due to EPA announcing they would deny the requests that they had received recommendations from the Department of Energy on. But that did not cover all of the pending gap-year requests.
As for the 2019 and 2020 compliance years, EPA data now shows 33 SREs pending for the two years combined, an increase from August data showing there were 31 SREs pending for the 2019 and 2020 compliance years.