Scientists form global bioenergy group

Ethanol Producer Magazine
December 2008
By Susanne Retka Schill
Web exclusive posted Nov. 24, 2008 at 11:37 a.m. CST

The groundwork is being laid to form an international body of scientists involved in bioenergy and biofuels to evaluate research being conducted around the world and help guide policy making efforts.

It would function much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose comments on climate change are considered authoritative, partly because of the breadth and inclusiveness of the scientists involved in the process.

“There is a clear need for an authoritative body that can comment on the longer term implications of bioenergy development,” said Luuk van der Wielen, leader of a Dutch delegation to a recent roundtable on biofuels. The Nov. 15 roundtable was organized in Chicago by van der Wielen and Madhu Khanna, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana who leads a research program on the socio-economic impacts of biofuels at the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) at the University of California-Berkeley. The meeting was sponsored by B-Basic, EBI and the Consulate of the Kingdom of The Netherland. This was a follow-up to a meeting held earlier this year in San Francisco, van der Wielen said, where U.S. DOE and USDA officials suggested a need for the scientific community to organize globally to address the economic, environmental and land use impacts of bioenergy and to use science to inform biofuel policy.

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