State Sen. Rob Hogg touted his support for renewables and biofuels while at the Iowa Central Community College fuel testing laboratory Tuesday.

The lab is one place where important innovations are taking place in the biofuels field, said Hogg, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican Sen. Charles Grassley for U.S. Senate this November.

“This is very helpful to have, because you need these products to work. You have to have the testing to be able to do that,” he said.

The Democratic senator from Cedar Rapids toured Iowa Central’s campus, visiting the TRIO Student Support Services program and the UnityPoint Health Training/Simulation Center as well as the lab, as part of his campaign tour through the area.

Hogg said supporting the standards that were already passed are an important first step, when it comes to the environment and climate change.

“The biggest thing we need is for the renewable fuel standard and those original goals to be kept in place,” he said.

“The environmental footprint for biofuels keeps going down, while the environmental footprint of oil is going up, and that is the fundamental difference and the fundamental benefit of biofuels,” Hogg added. “That’s the problem with the tar sands of Canada, or offshore oil production, or fracking for oil – those all make oil more environmentally harmful.”

Meanwhile, Hogg said biofuels are being made in new, more efficient ways.

The biofuels testing lab was created in 2006, initially as an offshoot of the college’s Biofuels Technology and Biotechnology programs.

It is a business run by employees, not students, and it tests samples from fuel makers, gas stations, and ordinary people who just want to know what they’re putting in their tractor, said lab Director Don Heck.

The lab serves about 120 clients in a given year, said Manager Julaine Bidleman.

“We have about 38 states represented, and six foreign countries,” she said.

Hogg cited his work in helping to extend a tax credit for B11 – that’s a blend of 11 percent biodiesel, 89 percent traditional diesel.

When national tax credits are delayed, that harms fuel producers in Iowa, Heck said.

“We notice a couple things,” he said. “Our regular volume goes down, and another thing is a lot of the smaller production facilities do get shuttered. They do not have the capital to weather a year of messing around with this stuff, while maybe or maybe not getting a tax credit.”

The TRIO program also suffers when funds are uncertain, said Director Jay Birkey.

The program helps students who are the first in their family to go to college, low income or disabled. It provides tutoring, academic advising, career planning and workshops.

Funding is never stable for the program, he said.

“In the last five-year grant cycle we had two years of level funding, and two years of budget decrease,” Birkey said. “We are operating today on our same amount of money we did six years ago. Think about how salaries and benefits have gone up. Think about how all our costs have gone up.

“Sequestration was a terrible thing,” he said of the automatic budget cuts enacted in 2014. “It was supposed to be the thing that made both sides say, we don’t like cutting those programs, we don’t like cutting defense, so Republicans and Democrats will work together to compromise and work things out. They didn’t do that, so everybody got cut.”

Hogg said lawmakers need to work together to fund education programs like TRIO.

“The sequester is just an example of Congress throwing up their hands and not functioning, not doing their job,” he said. “It takes the false approach that austerity is the way to get to prosperity. That has never worked, and it will never work.

“It doesn’t mean we have unlimited amounts of money, so we have to be strategic in our investments. But you have to invest in education training, because that’s the foundation of our economy.”

The way to fight partisan gridlock, he said, is to work on finding a “new consensus.”