Biofuel producers snuggling up to Congress to beg for their subsides back

Much like their fellow “green”-energy lobbyists in the wind industry struggling beneath the oh-so-crushing burden of not yet having their egregiously generous production and investment tax credits restored after their expiration at the end of 2013, biofuels enthusiasts are again ramping up their own calls for their restoration of their particular pork-tastic tax credits. Via The Hill:

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A coalition of biofuel advocacy organizations sent a letter Monday to the top tax lawmakers in the Senate urging them to renew expired tax credits that helped their industry.

The credits, which incentivized advanced biofuel production and infrastructure, expired Dec. 31, along with a slew of popular tax breaks.

“Advanced biofuel tax credits have allowed the biofuels industry to make great strides in reducing the cost of production and developing first-of-kind technologies to deploy the most innovative fuel in the world,” the groups said in their letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). …

Representatives of the Advanced Ethanol Council, the Advanced Biofuels Association, the Algae Biomass Organization, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, Growth Energy, the National Biodiesel Board and the Renewable Fuels Association signed the letter.

Yep. There is an Algae Biomass Organization, and it too wants its specially interested due.

This group’s particular plea mostly applies to what are known as advanced or second-generation biofuels from various types of biomass from which it’s difficult to extract fuel (hence the explicit subsidy-mongering), and in the meantime, we’re still waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to decide if they want to move forward on a reduction to the mother of all biofuels subsidies, the Renewable Fuel Standard. When the EPA announced late last year that they finally planned to acknowledge that the RFS’s mandate requiring an annually-increasing amount of ethanol to be blended into the nation’s gasoline supply could not coexist with the reality of declining free-market demand for gasoline, the old-fashioned corn-based biofuels lobby went into an almighty uproar, and they’ve been lobbying Congress and the administration on the regular to get them to keep plowing forward with the unworkable mandate to protect their overgrown industry. The EPA is supposed to finalize the standard for the coming year every November 30th, but we’re still waiting on the 2014 version because of the accompanying political difficulties (and yes, the standard will be enforced retroactively). Maybe sometime this year they’ll actually get around to telling us.

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