Speaking on behalf of the European Commission To The United States here at the Transition To A Bio Economy Conference was Laurent Javaudin. Laurent sent me a message about coming to the conference via my Twitter feed! I guess that makes him my Twitter buddy.

His comments focused on the impact of EU mandates for renewable energy. To start with, in the EU they don’t have a mandate of a certain number of gallons of biofuels. Instead they are looking at requiring alternative energy sources like biofuels be a percentage of the fuel consumed and achieve it by 2020. He says that they don’t consider just biofuels but also other alternative sources of energy. The biofuels that are considered must be produced in a sustainable way. They also expect these fuels to obtain at least a 35 percent decrease in green house gas emissions.

He says that after the political decision of December 2008, the implementation phase of the mandate for the 27 nations of the EU is now a work in progress and they hope to have it kicking in by the second quarter of 2010.

You can listen to my interview with Laurent here: ff-global-09-javaudin.mp3

You can download the interview with this link (mp3).

You can find photos from the conference here:
Transition To A Bio Economy Conference: Global & Trade Issues Photo Album