On the Campaign Trail with Ed Tibbetts

President Barack Obama has weighed in on the request to raise the cap on the amount of ethanol that can be blended with gasoline.

Ethanol groups have asked that it be raised from 10 percent to 15 percent. Earlier, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said he liked the idea of an increase, though not necessarily to 15 percent.

Yesterday, regional reporters, including one from the Des Moines Register, met with Obama and the president was asked what his position is on the request and whether he’d be involved in the decision.

Here’s what he had to say, according to a White House transcript:

At some point I usually get involved.  If it — somebody explained to me that nothing comes to my desk if it’s easy.  (Laughter.)  It means that somebody else has solved it.  And I suspect that this one will be reconciling a lot of different issues.

As you know, I’ve been a supporter of biofuels.  I think it is an important ingredient in our overall energy independence.  I’ve also said — and I said during the campaign trail in Iowa, in front of farmers — that it was important for us to transition to the next generation of biofuels, that we’ve got to do a much better job of developing cellulosic ethanol, that corn-based ethanol, over time, is not going to provide us with the energy-efficient solutions that are needed.

And I want to make sure, though, as somebody who comes from a corn-growing state, that the progress that we’ve made in building up a biofuels infrastructure and the important income generation that has come from ethanol plants, that that is sustained, that that’s maintained.

So our challenge, I think, is to see our current ethanol technology as a bridge to the biofuels technologies of the future.  And that’s what we want to invest in, and that’s what I’ll be directing my Department of Agriculture to focus on.

Bottom line: Obama sees corn-based ethanol as a bridge to future biofuel technologies and he wants to keep the bridge strong. He didn’t say whether the 15 percent proposal is the way to do it.

Here’s the Register’s article on the issue.