Thinking Outside the Barrel for Biofuels

What everyone wants are solutions which are not only good for the planet, but also good for business and good for development. Technological innovation is seen as the best hope of delivering this. The public sector and government jointly promote effective modalities for the development, application and diffusion of processes pertinent to climate change including the formulation of policies and programs for the effective transfer of environmentally sound technologies from lab conception to commercialization. This has resulted in an acceleration of first and second generation biofuel lab research to demo to rapid commercial scale plants using cellulosic and other feedstocks to produce ethanol, biodiesel, biocrude, or electricity from biomass. But like all our energy sources, there are certain biopower pathways that pose environmental and health risks. If these risks are not managed carefully, biomass for energy can be harvested at unsustainable rates, damage ecosystems, produce harmful air pollution, consume large amounts of water, and produce net greenhouse emissions. In this presentation we will review these impacts and the drivers accelerating the scale-up to commercialization of bio-technology processes in the advanced biofuels market.