Vilsack: charges that the US Administration is not supportive of biobased industries “incredibly maddening”
In Washington, USDA Secretary Vilsack went on the offensive for the Obama Administrations support of the bioeconomy, saying that “It is incredibly maddening to me, given all of the facts I have just outlined, that anybody who has any knowledge of what’s going on, would suggest that this Administration has not been supportive. That is just not true.”
In an interview with Industrial Biotechnology, Vilsack said “here has never been an Administration more supportive of agricultural biobased industries, and here is the litany of things that I know have been done. In this Administration, we have utilized all of the 90003 money under the 2008 Farm Bill, and we have encouraged Congress to continue funding that loan guarantee program for biobased fuel production. We have asked Congress specifically and explicitly to extend the reach of 90003 to extend biobased chemical production. We saw an opportunity to expand a program that had been popular; essentially, we provided conditional loans on 11 projects and closed three projects.”
The IB Interview entitled “A Conversation with US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack” included discussion of a new version of the Billion Ton study in development by the USDA and U.S. Department of Energy to assess supply and demand of biomass-based feedstocks, the USDA’s role in implementing the White House’s National Bioeconomy Blueprint, and recent and planned changes in monitoring and reporting of procurement of biobased products by the federal government and its contractors.
Category: Fuels
