For all of the attention it has received, ethanol is at best a transition step in the development of biofuels, according to the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Speaking at a meeting of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture in Bismarck, ND, last week, Nobel Prize winner Steve Chu noted that researchers are increasingly looking at grasses and waste materials to make gasoline and diesel-type fuel, rather than ethanol. “I think you have to go to this generation of biofuels so that it is not seen as a direct competition with food,” said Chu, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997. “Its energy inputs are far less than growing corn, which is a very heavy energy-intensive crop due to the fertilizer, all the tillage, everything else.”