Over and over again, the arrogance and trickiness astounds me.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized the secretary of energy to make loan guarantees to qualified renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.
It was supposed to add a much needed public boost to the development of U.S. renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, as well as to the economy.
Instead, the Department of Energy sat on billions of dollars.
Companies applying for the loans spent as much as $10 million on the process and waited as long as three years for a loan guarantee without a single one being granted by the Bush administration.
No longer shortsighted, DOE is facing marching orders from the White House.
How does that affect your strategic planning?
I guess the easiest answer is to say it’s a lot easier for a biofuel company to raise money when crude is $140 per barrel than when it drops down to $40. What we’re really trying to do as an industry is to say, ‘You know, we want to disconnect from a commodity called crude oil and establish a new commodity called energy from biomass.’
If crude oil stays at $40 forever all these technologies will only work with a significant amount of policy support that will be driven by job-creation, energy security, and I think to a lesser extent environmental concerns.
There needs to be some understanding that we’re really trying to make this shift from a crude oil-driven economy to a biomass-driven economy.