In its proposal this week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would maintain the minimum requirements for ethanol count in diesel, but not much more than that.

The proposed range for the 2012 requirement for cellulosic biofuel is 3.45-12.9 million gallons. The EPA proposes to maintain the 2012 advanced biofuel requirements under the RFS at 2 billion gallons as federal law requires. The proposed volumes and numbers can be found on this brief fact sheet from the EPA.

According to the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the EPA is required to set the annual standards each November for the following year based on the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) gasoline and diesel projections.

This Renewable Fuel Standard program (RFS) has, over the past few years, required increasing amounts of ethanol to be blended with conventional transportation fuels. But this year, the EPA has proposed scaling back the percentages of renewable fuels.

According to the EPA, this decision was not ideological, but instead based on projects for availability and price of biodiesel. But, the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) said the proposal was doing nothing in the way of promoting ethanol production, which would allow its percentage in blends to increase.

“Advanced biofuel producers continue to sail into a head wind created by tax policy favoring oil and gas,” RFA said in a statement. “The most immediate term solution to this problem is to enact meaningful and long-term tax incentives to spur construction of the first-commercial advanced biofuel plants, in much the same way that Congress has stood behind oil and gas production for nearly 100 years. American consumers can no longer afford to be dependent on foreign oil.”

The final EPA standards are set to be released by November 30, 2011.

Download the full 108-page EPA proposal here.