Proposed Senate Bill S.559: Securing America’s Future with Energy and Sustainable Technologies Act Comment on the Bill from an Advanced Biofuels Perspective

March 23, 2011

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by Robert E. Kozak (Advanced Biofuels USA) US Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Tim Johnson (D-SD) recently introduced Senate Bill S.599, the “Securing America’s Future with Energy and Sustainable Technologies Act” or SAFESTA. This bill contains numerous amendments to existing Energy legislation and is being advertised as a comprehensive approach to increasing biofuel, wind, and solar use in the United States.
As in any piece of Congressional legislation, the old saw, “The Devil is in the Details,” applies. A review of the biofuels portion of the proposed bill, Titles I, II, and III, found that the wording of many of the draft provisions seemed to work against the goal of increasing biofuel use. This is primarily because of proposed reductions in funding, the introduction of an overly complex vehicle fuel use mandate, and ill-defined definitions.
The following review analyzes the sections that raise the most questions from an advanced biofuels standpoint. The sections are listed in chronological order for ease of review.
Section 103. International Indirect Land Use Changes.
This section proposes a moratorium on the use of International Indirect Land Use Change (IILUC) equations when calculating biofuel greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The moratorium would end when the National Academy of Sciences issues a report on IILUC calculations that says if they should be used or not. The legislation does not appropriate any money for the study, however.
While this section probably has support from many people who have been involved in the IILUC debate, there are several points to consider when legislating NAS to conduct the study.

Funding: With NAS studies “you get what you pay for.” NAS is as expensive as a high-end consulting firm and a study should be funded accordingly. Therefore, an adequate appropriation for the NAS report should be included in the legislation. If this is not done, the budget for the report will instead come out of the discretionary budgets of DOE, USDA, and EPA. Given the cuts that have been made to their budgets, there would be very little left for the IILUC NAS report. With such a restricted budget, NAS would simply go to the Searchingers and other IILUC originators to perform cursory reviews on their work. Such a report would not be sufficient for Congress or the Administration to credibly act on the determinations made by the report.

Public Input: Without a sufficient budget for the IILUC report, NAS will resort to their basic requirements for perfunctory public input process, i.e. one public hearing near the beginning of the process. Given that IILUC research is in the very early stage, an expanded, in-depth, and continuous public input process must be put in place. This will enable local and national effects on crop yields, apart from multinational commodity markets, to be properly calculated. These crop yield effects can include: national land-use laws, traditional land-ownership patterns, national and local barriers to technologies, and national and local agricultural loan practices.

Section 104. Modification of Definition of Renewable Biomass.

Given the multiple changes in biomass definitions made in both Federal legislation and various agency regulations, the need for revised science-based definitions is seen by many as a useful task. However, requesting another NAS study, also without appropriated funding, within one year of enactment will most likely have the effect of making the situation worse by picking the wrong set of “winners & losers” to be eligible for Federal incentives for the following reason. READ MORE Download proposed legislation and MORE (Wall Street Journal)