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Conference Report: Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference

In its second year, the Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference attracted a capacity crowd, with over 450 attending, representing over 300 firms, program leaders of the key federal agencies and a small number of academics. Organized and sponsored by Jim Lane of the Biofuels Digest and Bill Lundberg of Alliance Biofuels, LLC, the objective has been to create an annual event focused on the private sector and the issues surrounding actual commercial delivery of advanced biofuels. The atmosphere of the conference reflected the renewed attention, and future promise, of the US biofuels sector. The US Environmental Protection Agency specifies that ‘advanced’ biofuels can come from virtually any feedstock, other than corn starch, as long as an approved life-cycle assessment verifies a reduction of greenhouse gases of 50% or more in comparison to petroleum fuels. Many of the firms attending the conference (perhaps the majority) were focused on cellulosic ethanol or other alcohol production. However, one could not attend the conference without the notion that truly ‘advanced’ biofuels are also increasingly being perceived as distillate fuels, and have been approved to ‘drop in’ to existing petroleum refining, transportation, storage and logistical infrastructure. From a key Environmental Protection Agency administrator calling for the need for biofuels to replace the ‘whole barrel’ (meaning not just gasoline extenders, but increased attention to bio-based diesel and jet fuels) to the sophisticated and concentrated demand of military and commercial aviation buyers, the next generation of the US biofuels sector is undoubtedly being shaped by these market forces toward hydrocarbon fuels. A preconference workshop on federal programs and policy from defense, energy, agriculture and transportation clearly laid out the changing landscape of market demand. Most of the speakers concurred – aviation will be the last user of high-energy liquid fuels. This longterm market also has demand that consistently exceeds supply, can be rapidly deployed across the nation’s airports (80% of the fuel comes from 75 ‘filling stations’), and values both long-term price and environmental performance. These all bode well for bio-jet entrepreneurs. At the end of the conference, another special break-out session on aviation fuels was held. It recapped national research and development progress by inter-agency efforts, such as the Commercial Alternative Aviation Fuels Initiative, but also included updates from four regions where commercialization is being planned. The states of Washington, California, Georgia and Ohio all reported setting the stage for these new regional supply chains of sustainable aviation fuel. With hydroprocessed vegetable oils now approved by the American Society for Testing and Materials, commercial delivery of a sustainable aviation biofuel can now become a reality. Another theme of the conference that seems closely associated with successful biofuel firms was the business strategy of producing both fuels and co-products. As amply pointed out by an industry analyst, clean tech firms as a whole began making a comeback in 2010. Among the 11 recent initial public offerings in the clean technology space, four were involved in biofuels: Amyris, Codexis, Gevo and Solazyme. All four have business plans that rely heavily on both biofuels and bioproducts. Just as with aviation biofuels, the conference ended with a special breakout session on biochemicals/bioproducts as well. That session emphasized the breadth of bioproduct possibilities, but also the fragility and limited size among many of these specialized markets. Matching supply and demand has been a critical success factor for biofuel/bioproduct firms that have gone public and are growing. Other solid evidence of the renewed enthusiasm and growth of the biofuels sector was found in the portion of the conference dedicated to finance. A particularly authoritative panel contrasted the history of rural development and energy projects with that of future advanced biofuel efforts. Larger, more complex, and at least initially considerably more risky, they brought all these factors to the attention of USDA over the past Biofuels (2011) 2(4), 373–374 Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference