It was one year ago today that President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At the signing ceremony, the president said the bill had three main objectives – energy conservation; making more productive use of domestic energy resources, including coal, and nuclear power, and oil and natural gas; and help diversify our energy supply by promoting alternative and renewable energy sources.

For the Renewable Fuels Association, or RFA, the most important part of that bill was the Renewable Fuels Standard, RFS – establishing for the first time a nationwide baseline for renewable fuel use. RFA sent out a release marking the anniversary and noting the “period of unprecedented growth and importance” the ethanol industry has seen over the past year, with construction started on 29 new ethanol biorefineries, representing nearly 2 billion gallons of annual ethanol production capacity.

In that release, there’s a quote from RFA president Bob Dinneen that puts ethanol in perspective with the other points of the energy bill. “While ethanol is not the solution to all of our energy problems, it is a critical element in achieving cleaner-burning fuel and some measure of energy independence. It will take a host of technologies to reach our ultimate goals, but ethanol and other renewable fuels are uniquely positioned to lessen our dependence on foreign oil today and to replace most of our imports in the future.”