Governors' Biofuels Coalition

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) launched a new campaign ad today vowing to reduce American imports of foreign oil while increasing domestic production.

The full chamber has not debated a single measure reported out of the committee, and prospects don’t look likely for energy action as the year winds down and Congress moves ever closer to the 2012 election.

A pair of senators is pushing U.S. EPA to explain the agency’s oversight of a biofuels production credit program after tens of millions of fraudulent credits were sold. The letter from Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) concerns the agency’s monitoring of renewable identification numbers (RINs), the 38-digit numbers corresponding to the production of a […]

In light of recent criticism and a scandal over fraudulent biofuels production credits, a coalition of environmental, agricultural and conservative spending groups are calling on a Senate committee to examine the renewable fuels standard.

For decades, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has made clear his feelings about ethanol. While speaker of the House in the 1990s, he blocked what was supposed to be the end of a then-$600 million-a-year tax incentive for ethanol blends. A decade later he was a paid consultant for a key biofuels group as it was just getting started and learning to navigate the Washington, D.C., lobbying scene.

The U.S. biofuels industry has more than 14 billion gallons in annual production capacity for fuel ethanol, according to new industry and government data, but growth has hit a plateau and experts see steady but slow capacity growth going forward.

The ethanol industry’s main subsidy is set to end soon, but that hasn’t stopped European competitors from trying to get a tax slapped on the American-made biofuel, claiming that federal and state incentives make the imported product unfairly cheap.

Old and new energy crossed paths in the American midwest last week: a new cellulosic ethanol refinery calledProject LIBERTY is on the way in for Emmetsburg, Iowa, while the U.S. State Department appears to have shut the door on the notorious Keystone XL oil pipeline project through Nebraska.

After four months of pressure campaigns and prognostication, the failure of the so-called congressional “supercommittee” to agree on $1.2 trillion in long-term spending cuts leaves energy and environmental programs in much the same position that they were after the August debt-limit deal: an uneasy limbo.

Reworked proposal might scrub pheasant habitat, benefit biofuels Count pheasant hunters among those who probably are disappointed Congress is plowing under the new farm bill. Biofuel producers, however, might be happy to see the bill go. Those groups were among winners and losers in the hastily crafted bill that House and Senate agriculture committees had […]