Here in Alabama, we don’t need an economist to tell us gas prices are punishing. We feel it every time we pull up to the pump, every time we pay a little more at the grocery store, every time a small business passes along a fuel surcharge it can’t afford to eat. A UAB economist said it plainly last week: for families of limited means, gasoline is something you buy no matter the price. “They have the least bandwidth to adjust.” That’s the truth — and it’s exactly why I’m encouraging Alabama’s congressional delegation to vote YES on the biofuel reform bill coming to the House floor on May 13.
I run a veteran-owned small business in Opelika. Global K9 Protection Group operates across 31 airports in 166 cities nationwide, which means fuel and freight costs are not abstractions for me — they show up in every contract, every logistics decision, and every conversation I have with the companies we serve. When fuel prices spike, my costs spike. When diesel goes up, air cargo fees go up. I see the ripple effects up and down the supply chain every single day. So, when I tell you that a Washington loophole is making things worse, I’m not speaking as a policy expert. I’m speaking as an Alabama small business owner who lives with the consequences.
Most people have never heard of the Small Refinery Exemption — and that’s exactly how some refinery companies like it. Here’s what it is: a government loophole that lets certain refining companies dodge their federal energy compliance costs. Those costs don’t disappear. They get shifted onto the rest of the fuel market, which means they get shifted onto you — at the pump, in your grocery bill, and on what your trucking and delivery companies charge just to stay in business.
Now, I’m a free-market person. I believe in competition, not government handouts. And that’s precisely why this loophole bothers me so much. The Small Refinery Exemption was created in 2010 to help genuinely small, financially struggling refineries comply with federal biofuel rules. That’s a reasonable idea. Nobody wants to put a small American business under.
But that’s not who’s using the exemption today.
Today, it’s mid-sized, publicly traded refining companies — some foreign-owned — claiming hardship exemptions while simultaneously reporting strong earnings, cutting debt and buying back their own stock to reward shareholders. One company, Cenovus’s Superior Refinery, operated profitably for four straight years without ever needing a single exemption. The moment it received one last year, it pocketed a $67 million profit windfall. That’s not relief for a struggling business. That’s a government check going to a company that didn’t need it — and leaving the rest of us to cover the tab.
What makes it worse is the double-talk. These companies stand before Congress and claim they can barely keep the lights on. Then they get on earnings calls with Wall Street investors and brag about how well they’re doing. Attorneys General in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota have formally raised concerns that this contradiction may violate federal disclosure laws. In Alabama, we call that saying one thing and doing another — and we don’t have much patience for it.
The House biofuel reform bill fixes this. It changes who qualifies for the exemption — from an individual refinery threshold to a company-wide one. If your company’s total refining capacity exceeds the limit, you don’t qualify, period. It protects genuinely small refiners who need help while closing the door to profitable companies gaming the system. The bill also expands access to E15 — a cheaper ethanol blend that can deliver real savings at the pump for Alabama drivers.
This isn’t a partisan issue. The bill is backed by the American Farm Bureau, the American Petroleum Institute, corn growers, ethanol producers and fuel retailers. The opposition comes from the narrow group of profitable companies that stand to lose a very lucrative loophole.
Alabama’s families, farmers and small businesses have been absorbing rising fuel costs long enough. Our farmers are already under intense pressure from high diesel prices that hit both their equipment and their inputs. They don’t need to be subsidizing a foreign refinery’s bottom line on top of it.
I’m urging Alabama’s members of Congress to support H.R. 1346 and hold firm on the per-company SRE threshold, especially Congressman Gary Palmer who sits on the powerful Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Close the loophole. Stand with Alabama consumers.
