GoldRIN Holdings, LLC

BACKGROUND

The Energy Policy Act (“Act”) passed in 2005 by the U.S. Congress, mandated the use of renewable fuels, including biodiesel fuel, to supplement fossil fuels with the goal of lessening U.S. dependence on foreign oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Act sought to accomplish this by tasking the EPA with the development of regulations for the blending of renewable fuels with traditional petroleum.

EPA requires refiners and importers (also known as Obligated Parties or “OP’s”) to meet annual volumetric mandates for renewable fuel production. This requirement is called the Renewable Volume Obligation or RVO.

Within the RFS, the EPA created a market-based system of credits (known as “RINs”) whereby those that blended renewable fuel with petroleum could sell either the “wet gallons” or they could sell the separated RINs to the obligated parties to meet the OP’s annual RVO.

RIN buying and selling has developed into an opaque market where speculators make windfall profits, and criminal conspiracies have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit gain.

Regulatory efforts by the EPA to solve the fraud problem, most recently the EPA Quality Assurance Program (QAP), have not been successful.

The EPA efforts have instead led to increasing compliance costs for all parties, a loss in business to small renewable fuel producers, and ever rising RIN prices which ultimately hurt the American consumer.

The solution to this market dysfunction

can be found in the free market itself
-
not in further regulation