Colorado Corn

Here's the latest from EPIC's Ethanol Good News Network:

The biggest reason Congress created incentives for renewable fuels such as ethanol was to reduce dependence on foreign oil -- especially from volatile regions such as the Middle East.

New federal figures show how far we've come.

In the first half of the year, domestic ethanol production nearly equaled oil imports from Iraq. We produced 101 million barrels of ethanol and imported 123 million barrels of Iraqi oil.

Iraq supplies about 11 percent of the oil we import from OPEC.

The U.S. ethanol industry will exceed this year's congressional mandate of 9 billion gallons of renewable fuel.

Congress has mandated the country to use 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels annually by 2022. That is more than what we import now from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait combined.