Craig Venter Quotes

Certain food-based biofuels like biodiesel have always been a bad idea. Others like corn ethanol have served a useful purpose and essentially are obsoleting themselves.

By reducing our dependence of foreign oil and increasing alternative energy sources such as ethanol, we can begin to bring down prices at the pumps, create thousands of new jobs and bring a much needed boost to our economy.

Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.

Corn ethanol can help in the short term, but it has serious limitations, and none of this is going to work if we don't dramatically improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks.

Now it will take a long time to scale biofuels, but I'm the only one in the world forecasting oil dropping in price to $35 a barrel by 2030. I'll put it on the record: Oil will not be able to compete with cellulosic biofuels. If you do it from food, the food will get so expensive you can't make fuel out of it.

Even as we work to develop more sources of petroleum for the United States, we must continue our vigorous pursuit of alternative fuels, so that we can be powered by cleaner, more efficient sources of energy.

Ethanol and biodiesel allow people to burn a cleaner form of energy.

If we can produce more ethanol and bio-diesel to help fuel our vehicles, we will create jobs, boost local economies and produce cleaner burning fuels. This will keep dollars here at home where they can have a positive impact on our economy.

We should increase our development of alternative fuels, taking advantage of renewable resources, like using corn and sugar to produce ethanol or soybeans to produce biodiesel.

The diesel engine can be fed with vegetable oils and would help considerably in the development of agriculture of the countries which use it. The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time.

The growth in ethanol and biodiesel is something that I have worked on since I was secretary of agriculture in Kansas. I would like to see a lot more progress, because I think there is a real score to be made on this.

For the Navy, developing alternatives to fossil fuels isn't just about fighting climate change - though that's an important side benefit. Biofuels will also play a much more practical role in the Navy's fuel mix, boosting our energy security and supporting the U.S. economy.

I've got an opinion on everything. Sure, you ought to do OCS, you ought to do renewables, you ought to do biofuels, you ought to do ethanol, all of them. Those are ours and we've got to get off the dependency on the foreign oil.

With the increasing demand for oil around the world and the rising costs in Oregon and throughout the nation, we must focus on the development of alternate energy sources, especially those that are clean, efficient and renewable.

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

But It doesn't make sense for us to have a continued reliance on a supply of oil where whenever there is unrest in another part of the world, gasoline prices jump up. We need a renewable fuel industry that's more than corn-based, of course, and there are a whole series of great opportunities here.

Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper.

Today, President Obama is making smart investments in clean energy - wind, solar, biofuels - as part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy that supports thousands of jobs, not in the Middle East, but in the Midwest.

If our country is serious about reducing our dependency on foreign oil, we need to get serious about mobilizing the infrastructure necessary to distribute and dispense the next generation of fuels.

Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

For example, a breakthrough in better batteries could supplant hydrogen. Better solar cells could replace or win out in this race to the fuel of the future. Those, I see, as the three big competitors: hydrogen, solar cells and then better batteries.

Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs.

It is critical to develop a biofuel industry powered by feedstocks produced in every corner of the country, in addition to the Midwest. That is why USDA has established five regional research centers working on science necessary to ensure profitable biofuels can be produced from a diverse range of feedstocks.

By furthering the use of ethanol, farmers are presented with the opportunity to produce a cash crop by collecting their agricultural wastes.

I don't believe that a hydrogen economy depends on a carbon economy at all.