Besides those out working in the industry we also heard from some university students today at the Transition To A Bio Economy conference. Lance Andrew Stewart is a grad student at the University of Tennessee. He did a very technical presentation on locating ethanol plants. His work focused on the location determinants that attract potential plants in certain areas. He …
USDA Rural Development Biofuels Assistance
We had USDA Rural Development represented here at the Transition To A Bio Economy conference by Tony Crooks. He works with their rural business cooperatives program and has done a lot of work with communities in the area of ethanol and biodiesel. The challenge he says we have today in rural communities is the large capital outlay to get a …
Energy BioSciences Institute Working on Solutions
Our luncheon speaker today was Paul Willems who works for BP Energy Biosciences Institute. He says it’s a collaboration between the University of California, Berkely, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois and BP. Paul says that their mission is to apply modern biology towards energy problems. The Institute was started in November of 2007 and is currently …
R&D Risk in Renewable Fuels
Two key words in a presentation at the Transition To A Bio Economy Conference were flexibility and diversification. These are important to managing risk, especially in R&D for renewable fuels. Our presenter was Gordon Rausser, University of California, Berkeley, who was here with his assistant Maya Papineau. I interviewed them both together after the presentation. Gordon says that we should …
Switchgrass Risks
The second session here at the Transition To A Bio Economy conference was on risk and uncertainty. Jim Larson, University of Tennessee, talked about farmers risk in growing switchgrass as a biomass feedstock for fuel production. He says that this is a commodity that will come into play looking forward. His research shows that it’s risky for farmers because it’s …
Getting Down To The Farm Level
One of our speakers here at the Transition To A Bio Economy conference brought the discussion down to the farm level. John Miranowski, Iowa State University, spoke about the impact of biofuels on the rural economy and the farm structure. He says that their numbers indicate that increasing biofuels production will have a positive impact on rural communities and farm …
Biotech Needed to Increase Biofuels
Like the first speaker on our program today here at the Transition To A Bio Economy conference, our second speaker, David Zilberman, University of California, Berkeley, says we need to increase agricultural productivity. His talk was on the distributional effects of biofeuls and he had two conclusions. The first one is that biofuels make some people better off and some …
Is There a Biofuel To Food Price Link?
The first speaker here at the Transition To A Bio Economy conference is Michael Wetzstein, University of Georgia. His talk deals with two issues. One is on price volatility and the other is on food and fuel. He’s one of 22 speakers on the program and all the talks are dealing with the biofuels issue. I’ll do my best to …
Learning The Impact of a Biofuels Transition
The Farm Foundation conference, “Transition To A Bio Economy, Risk, Infrastructure and Industry Evolution” is underway here in Berkeley, CA. We’ll be hearing from a lot of people including quite a few presenting University research on the whole biofuels business. This conference is part of a series of which this is part 3. The Transition to a Bioeconomy series is …
Transition To A Cooler Climate
Here’s the scene at the DoubleTree at Berkeley Marina where I’ll be posting from the Farm Foundation, Transition To A Bio Economy, conference. Berkeley is very pretty at sunset, especially if you’re on the water. It’s a lot cooler too. Right now it’s 53 degrees. That’s a big difference from the 86 degrees in KC, MO when I took off …