Published on Thursday, February 1, 2007 by Global Public Media Washington, DC--At an all-day Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee conference on "renewable biofuels," witnesses from three of America’s premier energy research institutions cast grave doubt on the feasibility of reaching President Bush’s State of the Union goal of manufacturing 35 billion gallons a year of alternative fuels by 2017.
The witnesses agreed that DOE’s spending on alternative fuels was far, far below what was necessary to meet the president’s goal, much less the more critical goals of increasing the country’s energy security while decreasing carbon emissions.
... Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), the most senior Republican on the committee and its previous chairman, brought this damaging testimony to light in the last session of an all-day, all-biofuels marathon with some 33 witnesses in six panels. During their respective testimonies, several witnesses on the final panel hinted that we could not manufacture enough alternative fuels to meet the president’s goal without an unprecedented shift in federal priorities.