The Top 100 People in Bioenergy 2011-12: #1 through #25, in depth
20.05.12
In Florida, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack headed the “Top 100 People in Bioenergy” as voted by the readers of Biofuels Digest and the Digest’s editorial board, just edging out BP Biofuels chief Philip New, and the heads of Raizen, POET, Solazyme and Amyris. In today’s Digest, we profile the Top 25 in depth.
1. Tom Vilsack, US Secretary of Agriculture
A runaway winner in the voting, Vilsack has been driving hard to implement a strong biofuels policy on behalf of the Obama Administration. A key driver of the DOE-USDA-US Navy partnership for commercializing advanced biofuels, and as chair of the Interagency Working Group (comprising the USDA, EPA, and DOE) has clearly been identified by the Digest readership as the key player in establishing policy stability, and pioneering the financing mechanisms to drive bioenergy forward in the 2010s. His key challenges? Maintaining a strong energy title in the 2012 Farm Bill, and making sure that affordable US feedstocks are available at scale for all the technologies that are coming down the bikeway, else we might see the same “rush to China” that has plagued US manufacturing throughout the past 20 years.
Source: Biofuels Digest