High-ranking officials in the oil industry and the Environmental Protection Agency expressed serious concern last week that biofuels-production targets mandated by law last year might not be met, creating a serious strain on the economy. The head of the American Petroleum Institute and a career EPA official were cautiously optimistic, but said technological gaps and a lack of critical infrastructure could impede the targets from being met. The so-called renewable fuels standard that became law in December calls for 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be produced annually by 2022. The gradually increasing targets in the bill (H.R.6) are heavily dependent on the commercialization of cel-lulosic ethanol, a technology that involves taking fibrous bio-mass, such as wood, and turning it into liquid fuel. Red Cavaney, API's president, said Monday that "it's very difficult to make a totally successful change [to biofuels] overnight." Cavaney, speaking at a conference hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers International, said oil companies would like to see Congress incorporate some "flexibility" into the federal biofuels mandate as the 36-billion-gallon target approaches in 2022. Cavaney noted that at present, the vast majority of the biofuels that are being produced are coming from corn. It will not be easy to make the switch to cellulosic ethanol, he warned.
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