The Trump administration is expected on Monday to approve an expanded volume of biofuel waivers for US oil refiners, covering more than 1.8 billion renewable fuel credits, Reuters reports, citing sources

Small refinery exemptions from the renewable fuel standard have been a recurring flashpoint across administrations of both parties, and the usual sequence is well established: an expanded waiver batch reduces obligated parties' need to buy renewable identification numbers, which pressures RIN prices and, through the blending margin, reshapes the economics of ethanol and biodiesel blending. The transmission channel runs first through RIN values rather than outright crude, though sustained softness in blending obligations has in past episodes fed back into refinery margin calculations and, at the margin, into run rates and gasoline and distillate crack spreads. The farm belt versus refinery lobbying contest is the standing backdrop here, and prior rounds of generous exemption granting have tended to draw legal challenges from biofuel producers and demands for reallocation of the waived volumes onto non-exempt refiners, which is the tell for whether the burden merely shifts rather than disappears. What is worth watching next is whether the approval includes reallocation language, how the biomass-based diesel and conventional ethanol RIN vintages respond relative to each other, and any response from the biofuel and agricultural lobbies, since litigation and administrative reversal have on previous occasions unwound parts of these decisions. Directionally, expanded waivers are a headwind for RINs and blending margins and a modest tailwind for merchant refiners with compliance exposure, consistent with how comparable episodes have traded.