The Trump administration handed farmers and the ethanol industry a win on Wednesday by issuing a waiver that will allow the use of higher corn-based ethanol blends in gas tanks this summer.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin made the announcement at CERAWeek, a major energy conference in Texas, saying it furthered the administration’s goal of creating “American energy dominance” and will give consumers relief from soaring gas prices.

Critics question whether the waiver will do either.

The announcement comes as rising gas prices linked to the conflict in Iran are becoming a political crisis for President Donald Trump and as he appears to be losing the support of farmers, a key constituency that twice helped usher him to the White House.

“President Trump has prioritized ensuring American families have an affordable domestic energy supply,” Zeldin said in his speech. “The Trump administration has made great strides on this during the first year and will continue to do so.”

The waiver was announced days before the expected release of long-anticipated increases to biofuels blending requirements that will have major consequences for energy and farm policy across the country—and, critics say, damaging consequences for the climate.

The biofuel and agriculture industry are perennially locked in a conflict with gas refiners over blending requirements. Gas refineries typically push for lower biofuels blending quotas; soy and corn growers and biofuels plants push for higher ones.

Environmental advocates and researchers, meanwhile, question the purported emission-lowering benefits, which are required by the Renewable Fuel Standard, first passed by Congress in 2005 and, arguably, the backbone of American agriculture and policy.

The waiver, granted on an emergency basis for the last five years—by both the Trump and Biden administrations—allows the sale of E15, a gasoline blended with up to 15 percent ethanol. The agency typically bans E15 sales in the summer because the blend is more volatile in the heat and leads to smog.

The EPA will also waive the federal enforcement of certain blend limits that allow varying percentages of ethanol in different states based on their air-quality requirements under the Clean Air Act.

The move comes as the administration is struggling to appease consumers upset about rising energy prices because of the oil chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz after Trump’s strikes in Iran.

It also gives farmers, a critical but increasingly frustrated constituency, a boost. Agricultural producers are suffering from low corn and soybean prices, due in large part to Trump’s trade war with China, and higher production costs, largely from increased fertilizer and fuel prices since the conflict in Iran began.

The move on E15 is temporary. Many farm-state lawmakers, along with the farm lobby, used the moment Wednesday to renew their push for Congress to pass legislation that would allow year-round sales.

“As consumers and farmers are facing higher costs because of the war in Iran, this is an important step to provide some relief. Every cent saved at the pump can make a real difference,” said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

The average price per gallon has reached nearly $4 since the launch of the conflict. The American Farm Bureau Federation says the waiver could lead to as much as a 30-cent cost savings per gallon. Gas industry analysts put the savings figure in the single digits.

Klobuchar, who is no Trump ally but represents a corn- and soy-growing powerhouse, introduced legislation in 2023 that would allow year-round sales of ethanol blends higher than 10 percent.

In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the EPA approved year-round E15 sales. But the oil refining industry sued, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in its favor, saying the agency overstepped its mandate.

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Both sides of the ongoing battle are keenly waiting for the EPA to release its latest blending standards for 2026 and 2027. Last year, in a proposed rule, the agency raised the volume requirements for biofuel. Trump will host a group of farmers and biofuel producers at the White House on Friday, leading some analysts to believe the standards will be released by the end of the week.

Analysts have noted that increasing biofuel mandates will outstrip American agriculture’s capacity to produce enough corn and soybeans to meet them. While the country’s producers currently have a massive surplus of corn and soybeans—the basic feedstocks of biofuel—the huge demand for oils of both crops has led to very tight supplies.

“The fatal flaw in the RFS proposal is that it ignores any realistic assessment of how much domestic feedstock is available for fuel production, proposing volumes that far exceed domestic feedstock availability,” wrote Jeremy Martin, director of the fuels policy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “These mandates can only be met with a combination of imports and counterproductive shuffling of vegetable oil out of food markets and into fuel markets, where it will be backfilled with increased imports in these markets. This will raise fuel prices for drivers, increase the deficit, raise food prices, increase global hunger and accelerate deforestation.”

Martin pointed to recent research demonstrating that mandates for biofuel-based diesel, which now uses nearly 20 percent of the world’s vegetable oil, have led to the deforestation of carbon-rich tropical forests. That conversion of forest means these oils have greater greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum-based fuels.

Research on corn ethanol has come to similar conclusions.

Meanwhile, one of the country’s preeminent biofuel researchers noted recently that emergency summer waivers for E15 have barely moved the needle on the overall amount of ethanol blended into the country’s fuel mix, rising from about 9.5 to 10.5 percent over the last decade.

“I expect relatively slow growth in the U.S. ethanol blend rate from where it is now, about 10.5 percent,” said Scott Irwin, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in a recent webinar. “But regardless of what the path is, I do think it will be upward, and it’s important to remember that each 10th that the ethanol blend rate increases, that raises domestic U.S. ethanol demand by about 130 million gallons. So even small improvements in the blend rate do matter.”