OREANDA-NEWS. For those ethanol producers outside of the US, the subtitle of the Renewable Fuels Association’s National Ethanol Conference — “Going Global” — is likely to unleash ripples of unease across their industry. Far from reeling from a perceived loss of support in the face of government hesitation and collapsing crude oil prices, the US ethanol sector is enjoying an upbeat gathering deep in the heart of Texas.

You could be forgiven for thinking the RFA had lost its way in bringing the National Ethanol Conference to Dallas. After all, only two things come from Texas … oil and gas. But there’s a potent symbolism in bringing the ethanol bandwagon to the spiritual home of the Ewing family, particularly after the last 18 months.

By any measure, the US ethanol industry has been a runaway success — production has ramped up, and through the tail end of 2014 and into 2015, ethanol production came within touching distance of breaking the next big milestone: a million barrels of ethanol a day. The industry is already the most efficient producer of ethanol in the world, and delegates at the conference were treated to updates on cellulosic ethanol production and what that could mean for production.

Cellulosic, to be fair, has been on the horizon, mirage-like, for a while. By 2014, the US was expected to be producing 1.75 billion gallons of the stuff, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed volume is much lower — 17 million gallons. It is the holy grail though, allowing the extraction of fuel grade ethanol not from the food parts of plants, but from the stalks, leaves, roots and other waste portions. It slays the food versus fuel debate overnight, and it raises the potential for the US to further extend its substantial lead in ethanol production.

If it works.

And it does. It’s just not yet on a substantial scale. But the message is clear: it’s coming.

But the problem has been that the landscape around biofuels has substantially changed over the last few years — shale has governments all over the world frantically digging up their own backyards, convinced that they’ve been sitting on the answer to all of their energy problems all along. Oversupply of crude has seen the complex crash as prices fold, while those nagging concerns about how we feed a population of 7 billion people today, 8 billion plus tomorrow, raises the moral issue around food for fuel.

That, in turn, has fueled speculation that the sector is ebbing political support across both of the substantial markets of the US and Europe. Evidence of that has been cited in the EPA’s delay in agreeing on 2014 (you read that right — 2014) obligations; folks active in the US market literally don’t know how much biofuel they should have blended into the energy mix in 2014 yet. The conference saw Director of the EPA’s Office of Air Quality and Transportation Christopher Grundler start his presentation with an apology. Too much information was the delay; too few people, too complex an issue to resolve in an annual timeframe. But the suspicion lingers that a government committed to biofuels, and ethanol particularly, would not let that happen.

So this year’s conference sounds the warning bell to the rest of the world. Who needs the RFS? Who needs the EPA?! We’ve already proven we can make the stuff … now it’s time to take it global.

There are some persuasive arguments around this solution. Bob Dinneen, the near-legendary head of the RFA, cited 61 countries globally that have biofuel mandates in place. Target them. Grow the economy at home and target the locations in the world where opportunities remain — the “explosive growth” of China and India is an opportunity, says Dinneen, while Pedro Paranhos, vice president of Eco-Energy, pointed out that the US has already supplanted many of Brazil’s traditional export markets, with the only markets proving immune are those where quality and feedstock issues give Brazilian outflows an advantage.

Roping in Ambassador Ron Kirk, part of Obama’s administration and a former mayor of Dallas, delegates were treated to mouthwatering statistics surrounding the benefits of trade and export. In 2014, the US exported \$2.3 trillion dollars in US goods; for the first time, 13% of GDP came from exports — the highest ever — and 11.3 million jobs relied on the export opportunities.

Furthermore, in statistics almost tailor-made for the diverse ethanol production industry (where production is often undertaken by relatively small companies), most American workers are employed in a company that employs fewer than 20 people, 70% of exporters only sell to one company in one country and 95% of exporters are small companies. In short, there’s undoubtedly room to grow.

And that’s bad news for anyone else looking overseas for new opportunities. It’s bad news for anyone who has a homegrown industry too. While the focus has been on encouraging exports and galvanizing support overseas, “instead of dividing the pie further, we need to make the pie bigger,” was how one delegate described it.

However, that same delegate had already said during his presentation on the health of Europe’s industry that Europe’s glass “is half empty, not half full. But we’re not dead yet.” Europe has, controversially in these parts, slammed the door on US exports already, although the anticipated Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership has some in the US anticipating an end to those shenanigans.

The burgeoning firepower that the US ethanol industry can bring to the global market could yet see further pressure heaped upon the rest of the world’s ethanol producers, and in a way there’s a determined irony to the tacit turning your back on the RFS as it stumbles towards re-establishing the framework around which investment and growth hangs, and looking to the world’s markets to insulate yourself from those political uncertainties.

As J.R. himself said: “Anything worth having is worth going for … all the way.” Those in the US ethanol industry would agree. The rest of the world has been warned.