HollyFrontier Cheyenne Refining, LLC v. Renewable Fuels Association

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Tenth Circuit and upheld “extension[s]” of exemptions from renewal fuel program requirements for three small refineries. EPA granted the extensions after a “lull” during which the refineries were not subject to exemptions. The Clean Air Act provision at issue authorizes small refineries to petition EPA “for an extension of the exemption … for the reason of disproportionate economic hardship.” The Court held that the provision used “extension” in its “temporal sense,” but that the statute did not impose a “continuity requirement” and instead allowed small refineries to apply for hardship extensions “at any time.” The Court therefore held that renewable fuel producers who challenged EPA’s approvals of the refineries’ extension requests had not shown that EPA acted in excess of its statutory authority. Justice Barrett dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. In their view, the majority’s interpretation “caters to an outlier meaning of ‘extend’ and clashes with statutory structure.”

On January 8, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a petition for writ of certiorari seeking review of a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that vacated U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) orders granting three petitions for extensions of small refinery exemptions from renewable fuel standards. The Tenth Circuit agreed with a coalition of renewable fuel producers that EPA exceeded its statutory authority granting extensions when none of the three small refineries had received an initial exemption in the years preceding their petitions for extension. The court also found that EPA improperly relied on hardship caused by factors other than compliance with renewable fuel obligations as a basis for granting the extensions. The petition for writ of certiorari raised the question of whether a small refinery must receive “uninterrupted, continuous hardship exemptions for every year since 2011” to qualify for a hardship exemption.