Growing First and Second Generation Renewable Fuels
by Anna Rath and Adam Monroe (The Hill Congress Blog) While there is a lot of back-and-forth in Washington about the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), there is just one fundamental choice at the heart of the debate: do we want alternatives to oil, or not?
As Congress holds hearings, Members must ask themselves: should we cleave to the status quo or pursue innovative new energy sources? Can Americans live with massive oil spills or do they deserve access to cleaner, safer fuel sources? And lastly, should consumers continue to hand their hard-earned money over to the oil monopoly or will they instead be able to reap the benefits of fuel diversity?
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Companies like San Francisco-based NexSteppe are pioneering the next generation of scalable, sustainable and cost-effective feedstock solutions for renewable fuel. We develop and commercialize dedicated energy crops like sweet and high biomass sorghum that use less water, are not food crops and can be grown on marginal land. Strong and consistent policies that promote the development and production of first and second generation biofuels has made Brazil, one of our other principal markets, a leader in biofuel production. We need to protect the one U.S. policy that is successfully bringing renewable fuel to the market here and giving U.S. consumers a choice; the RFS. Without the RFS the renewable fuels business may migrate outside the U.S.—and the jobs it creates and the investments we make will follow.
Investors will finance a product when they know there will be a market for it. READ MORE
