World Grain - October 2011 - 71

BIOFUELS QUARTERLY: MARKETING MANEUVERS

to open up new markets, and E15 will be one of them.” PUSHING CELLULOSE Another new market is cellulose ethanol. It’s time to embrace it and use it to broaden the industry’s political base, said Bruce Dale, professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University, who received the Award of Excellence during FEW. “If you do so energetically and sincerely, you’ll ﬁnd that the environmental movement, which has largely been your adversary, will start to become your friend. Many of them believe that if we do cellulose biofuels right, it will lead to very large environmental improvements,” Dale said. “You’ll have the leverage of a much larger resource base where you can start talking about replacing 50%, 60% or even 100% of oil.” Dale said the wealth of a society is strongly connected to its use of energy, noting that as one of the world’s original oil countries, the U.S. was propelled into great positions of wealth and inﬂuence. But now we’re entering the declining age of oil, and because of that, the country has not experienced much economic growth. “Unless we solve that problem, we can look forward to less prosperity for our country and other countries,” he said. “How do we solve that problem? We solve it by developing renewable, sustainable fuels.” The most logical place to begin is on the back of the existing ethanol industry, which already has the infrastructure in place, Dale said. It will require some new thinking and embracing some new ideas that have been a little foreign to the industry in the past. “The U.S. led the world into the oil age, and now we have the chance to lead the world into the age of renewable fuels,” Dale said. That sentiment was echoed by a group of cellulose industry leaders who participated in a panel discussion during FEW. They updated attendees on their companies’ respective efforts in comwww.World-Grain.com / World Grain / October 2011

mercialization and provided some insight on the industry overall. Rapid commercialization is important, said John McCarthy, president and CEO of Qteros, which is why it makes sense to leverage what’s already in the ground. Right now, there’s no funding available for greenﬁeld plants. Wes Bolsen, chief marketing ofﬁcer

and vice-president of government affairs for Coskata, said it’s important that cellulose biofuels be feedstock ﬂexible. That way the industry isn’t just focused in the Midwest, but throughout the U.S.
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World Grain - October 2011

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