Legislative Champion
It’s Good for Jobs
It’s Good for
the Environment
It’s Good for
National Defense
Biodiesel producers and
marketers can trace much
of their success to the hard
work of veteran U.S. Sen.
Chuck Grassley.
The Iowa Republican has made the
biodiesel industry a chief concern for
much of his 37-year tenure on Capitol
Hill. He led the way in 2004 and 2005
when Congress passed two landmark
measures that have helped spark the
industry’s growth to 2.9 billion annual
gallons and beyond: the Renewable Fuel
Standard (RFS) and the Biodiesel Tax
Credit.
While there have been challenges
with both measures through the years,
the overall effects of both have been
highly favorable. The RFS has created
financial incentives for the blending
of biodiesel with petroleum, while the
biodiesel tax credit has reduced the
market price of biodiesel and helped the
fuel compete.
Grassley, a family farmer himself,
has been proud to bring his legendary
tenacity to bear for biodiesel. “There is
an abundance of soybeans in my state,
and the value added beyond exports
is very important to our economy,”
he said. Biodiesel also helps reduce
U.S. dependence on foreign sources
of energy and improves national
security. “The fuel is clean burning
and low-carbon, so it’s very good for
the environment, and you create good
paying jobs in rural America, where the
small towns often don’t have that,” he
said.
Since the RFS was established in
2005, Grassley has worked hard to make
the law more effective for biodiesel by
raising the required volume obligations
(RVOs) for advanced biofuels and
biomass-based biodiesel.
He has also worked to preserve
the biodiesel tax credit and resuscitate
it whenever it has lapsed. “We need
to have the tax credit for biodiesel
to become a viable, mature industry,
and every time it sunsets, we have to
reauthorize it. It got reauthorized in this
last deal we did, but only for 2017. Now
here we are in 2018, and we ought to
have had it authorized for two or three
years so that the industry could depend
on it. We need some certainty so that
we can expand production.”
Changes in U.S. petroleum
production have only made his job
harder. Since the Oil & Gas producers
began using hydraulic fracturing, aka
fracking, to increase yields, production
has soared and the United States has
regained its place as a global petroleum
powerhouse. Concern about energy
security was so diminished by late 2015
that Congress lifted a ban on crude oil
exports that had been in place for 40
years.
“Back in the 1980s we thought we
weren’t going to have any more natural
6 Biodiesel Success Stories