Weekly Video Address
April 13, 2016
It looked like there might have been a chance to offer some energy tax provisions to the Federal Aviation Administration bill before the Senate.
I never want to miss an opportunity to advocate for biofuels. With that in mind, I filed a bipartisan amendment that would modify and improve the biodiesel tax credit.
Congress created the biodiesel tax incentive in 2005. As a result of that, and the Renewable Fuel Standard, biodiesel provides significant benefits to the nation.
Domestic biodiesel production supports tens of thousands of jobs.
Senator Maria Cantwell and I are promoting a modification to the current incentive.
We’d make the credit available for the domestic production of biodiesel, rather than a mixture credit available to the blender of the fuel.
Converting to a producer credit makes sense. The blenders credit can be hard to administer. Blending can occur at many different stages of the fuel distribution.
This can make it difficult to ensure that only fuel that qualifies for the credit claims the incentive. It has been susceptible to abuse because of this.
A credit for domestic production will also ensure that we’re incentivizing a domestic industry, rather than subsidizing imported biofuels.
It’s projected that imports from Argentina, Singapore, the European Union and South Korea could total more than one billion gallons in 2016 and 2017.
We should not provide a U.S. taxpayer benefit to imported biofuels.
This is a common-sense, cost reduction modification.
I’ll keep working to get it done.
