Ethanol advocates: Tax credits and mandate essential

JournalStar.com (Lincoln, NE)
By ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
Posted: Thursday, March 25, 2010 10:00 pm

It might have been a good day for Iowa State University agricultural economist Bruce Babcock to be away from his office, as he was Thursday.

As ethanol advocates in the U.S. House of Representatives advanced a bill to extend a 45-cent federal production credit for five more years, Babcock, a prominent ethanol policy analyst in the nation's leading ethanol state, was questioning the need.

Import tariffs and a separate requirement mandating use of as much as 15 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2015 should be enough to keep ethanol plants in prime production mode in Iowa, Nebraska and other states, Babcock said.

Read more