December 15, 2023

Duckworth Statement on Biden Administration’s New Sustainable Aviation Fuel Tax Credit Implementation Guidance

 

[WASHINGTON, D.C.] – U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)—member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (CST) and Chair of the Subcommittee on Aviation Safety, Operations and Innovation—issued the following statement after the Biden Administration’s Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service announced a notice regarding the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) tax credit requirements created in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022:

“After months of pushing the Biden Administration to adopt Argonne National Lab’s GREET model—the gold standard for analyzing the lifecycle greenhouse gases impacts of renewable fuels—in their SAF tax credit guidance, I appreciate the Biden Administration taking our concerns into account as we work to reduce our nation’s carbon footprint and transition to a greener economy. We are making progress toward this goal, but we must ensure that American SAF continues to lead the world in this effort. One of the most important things we can do to continue this leadership decarbonizing our skies is to increase the supply of American-grown, American-made SAF. We will not be able to meet President Biden’s SAF Grand Challenge nor lower our aviation carbon emissions in the near future without agricultural feedstock SAF. In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll be closely monitoring this rollout of the modifications to the GREET model to ensure its implementation doesn’t undermine our agriculture industry’s ability to produce sustainable aviation fuel, jeopardize our nation’s energy security and hurt our farmers.”

Duckworth has been a local and national leader in supporting biofuels, including sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The Senator has been outspoken about the necessity for the U.S. to utilize agricultural feedstock for SAF in order to meet President Biden’s ambitious emissions and production goals and the commonsense application of the Department of Energy’s commissioned Argonne National Lab’s Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies Model (GREET) lifecycle analysis for global and domestic SAF evaluations.

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