Striking while the post-State-of-the-Union/budge release iron is hot, President Obama Wednesday unveiled details of his administration’s plans for the next generation of energy technology. With the FY 2011 budget backing loans for the development of nuclear power plants eating up several days of the news cycle, yesterday’s announcement shifted energy and environment watchers’ gaze toward biofuels and carbon capture. From the Environmental Protection Agency’s release:

The EPA has finalized a rule to implement the long-term renewable fuels standard of 36 billion gallons by 2022 established by Congress. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has proposed a rule on the Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP) that would provide financing to increase the conversion of biomass to bioenergy. The President’s Biofuels Interagency Working Group released its first report – Growing America’s Fuel. The report, authored by group co-chairs, Secretaries Vilsack and Chu, and Administrator Jackson, lays out a strategy to advance the development and commercialization of a sustainable biofuels industry to meet or exceed the nation’s biofuels targets.

In addition, President Obama announced a Presidential Memorandum creating an Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage to develop a comprehensive and coordinated federal strategy to speed the development and deployment of clean coal technologies. Our nation’s economy will continue to rely on the availability and affordability of domestic coal for decades to meet its energy needs, and these advances are necessary to reduce pollution in the meantime. The President calls for five to ten commercial demonstration projects to be up and running by 2016.

The EPA’s move on biofuels puts the Obama administration in compliance with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) but finding the right alchemy of fuels to meet the standard is likely to be a subject of political and logistical debate, not to mention the difficulties in calculating the GHG implications.

As for CCS, yesterday’s announcement regarding the proverbial “clean coal” marks some of the first official murmurs from the White House on the technology since it announced its plans to kick FutureGen back in gear last summer. I’ll be interested to see what the president’s task force can pull together in a 180 days that will put CCS within reach in the next five years.

Tiffany Clements is managing editor of Weathervane.