I have spent some time with the Saskatchewan government. They are very supportive of an appropriate ethanol program.
We have to be very careful in what we say about the feedstocks for grain ethanol as they relate to food prices and things such as that. There are just as many studies showing that it's not the case that it's been responsible for the increase in shortages of food. In some cases.... There's the infamous taco story from Mexico. My understanding is that it is more trade- and tariff-related than anything else.
We're suggesting that when you have an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by half relative to gasoline and you have more than 100,000 of our vehicles out there now that can run on it, if we don't take advantage of it, this is a real missed opportunity. We've been talking with the provinces in the prairies about an ethanol highway across Canada, where it makes sense to do so. It's the same with biodiesel. I'm driving a clean diesel vehicle now that can run on biodiesel, and it's great.
So I think there are real opportunities here. But we have to be very careful, because a lot of these feedstocks are feedstocks for livestock. You can create the ethanol from them and can still use the mash, if you will, for food for the livestock. But you can use the waste from it, through a cellulosic process, to create ethanol as well. This is where we have to go eventually: to all the opportunities that are showing themselves now—they're evolving—that relate to cellulosic ethanol.
Again, we have a real opportunity here. When you look at the global demand for vehicles and the energy that will be required to power those vehicles, we have to look to diversifying the fuel mix as well as we can.
Globally speaking, demand right now is 71 million vehicles. It's going up to probably 91 million vehicles in ten years. We have to find some way to power those vehicles in a clean and environmentally responsible way.