Bush's Goal is 20 Precent Cut in Gas Use in 10 years - 1/24/07

President Bush asked the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to set a goal of reducing American gasoline consumption by 20% over 10 years, mostly through a nearly five-fold increase in use of home-grown fuels like ethanol by the year 2017.

Bush wants to achieve the target through improved vehicle fuel standards and increased production of alternative fuels.

Bush's "20 by 10 " strategy furthers a theme Bush has tried to drive home in his annual speeches since 2001 to cut U.S. dependence on crude oil imports. In a surprise pronouncement a year ago, Bush said that the United States was addicted to crude oil. Not much has changed since 2001's speech.

A rising focus on "energy security" by both the Bush administration and Congress has added momentum to efforts to employ home-grown fuel sources like ethanol to reduce U.S. dependency on oil imports. While ethonal has increased the real challanged not yet addressed is not using our presious corn supply to produce ethanol. We need to be able to use our agricultural waste and forms or grass.

About 60 percent of U.S. petroleum supplies currently come from imports. The devlopment of alternative fuels such as ethanol, hydrogen and others will have to be jump started to lower this number.

Bush's proposal is modest compared to some legislation on Capitol Hill.

A group of Midwest senators, including presidential candidate and Illinois Democrat Barack Obama, introduced the BioFuels Security Act, which would require fuel suppliers to use 60 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel a year in U.S. motor fuels by 2030.

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