Biofuel policies are going to start coming to a head in December as the EPA has to make its call on 15 percent ethanol blends as well as explain how the agency will manage the lifecycle analysis of advanced and cellulosic biofuels, or in other words, address the indirect land-use change theory.

Growth Energy issued a news release Tuesday stating that "Big Food and Big Oil" are slapping ads all over Washington to discourage policymakers from supporting ethanol policies.

“Some people’s interest in all this goes as far as the profit they can make from selling a box of corn flakes,” said Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy. ”They don’t care to take Hugo Chavez out of the business of selling oil to the U.S., and they don’t care about creating a sustainable, green economy that creates U.S. jobs while cutting carbon emissions. Ethanol does all those things.”

Growth Energy said the ads specifically attack the attempts to push ethanol blends from E-10 to E-15.

Beyond ethanol, the $1 per-gallon biodiesel tax incentive is set to expire Dec. 31. The American Soybean Association stated Tuesday that "its extension is a top priority for ASA." The group stated that "If the biodiesel tax incentive is allowed to expire, the production and use of biodiesel in the U.S. will come to a halt. The economics of biodiesel at this stage will simply not work absent the federal tax incentive."

The ASA is mounting a campaign to get behind a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., that would extend the credit for five years an also restructure the way the credit is used. The ASA is rallying its members to write their lawmakers to back the bill.

One credit not likely to get extended its the alternative fuels mixture credit that we wrote about last week at DTN. Initially created to help spur new alternative fuels, the credit has instead been tapped by the paper-mill industry to credit the production of "black liquor," a fuel byproduct of making paper. At 50-cents a gallon, the paper industry could collect more than $6 billion from the credit in 2009 alone. While some lawmakers pushed much earlier in the year to eliminate the credit or block the paper industry from collecting, the efforts went nowhere. Instead, lawmakers allowed that $6 billion to go out the door and are apparently content to just sunset the tax break.

I can be found on Twitter at chrisclaytonDTN.