Excerpt from speech to Washington International Renewable Energy Conference.
In 2005 the United States became the world's leading ethanol producer. Last year we accounted for nearly half of the worldwide ethanol production. I don't know if our fellow citizens understand that, but there is a substantial change taking place, primarily in the Midwest of our country.
Corn ethanol holds a lot of promise, but there's a lot of challenges. If you're a hog-raiser in the United States, you're beginning to worry about the cost of corn to feed your animals. I'm beginning to hear complaints from our cattlemen about the high price of corn. The high price of corn is beginning to affect the price of food.
And so we got to do something about it, and the best thing to do is not to retreat from our commitment to alternative fuels, but to spend research and development money on alternatives to ethanol made from other materials -- for example, cellulosic ethanol holds a lot of promise. I'm sure there are people in the industry here that will tell you how far the industry has come in a very quick period of time.
I look forward to the day when Texas ranchers can grow switchgrass on their country, and then have that switchgrass be converted to fuel. I look forward to the day when people in the parts of our country that have got a lot of forests are able to convert wood chips into fuel. And those days are coming. (Applause.)
The Department of Energy had dedicated nearly $1 billion to develop technologies that can make cellulosic ethanol cost competitive. And the interesting thing that's happened in a relatively quick period of time is that the projected cost of cellulosic ethanol has dropped by more than 60 percent. In other words, new technologies are coming. The job of the federal government is to expedite their arrival.Speech transcript on WhiteHouse.gov
