Reporting After Day 1

Day one of the International Conference on Sorghum for Biofuel will be wrapping up in the next hour or so and I wanted to update you on a few of the things that have happened here in Houston today.

Over 200 attendees registered for this first conference day and the ballroom is packed. It's a reporter's dream...all of the world's experts on one subject are crammed into one room. It's a captive audience and that means tracking down information is as simple as standing up and hollering your question across the room. Ok, not really. The conference has really been fabulously put together and noone has yelled across the room.


Tomorrow, however, will be the day for yelling questions across the room. This bevy of brilliant minds will spend Wednesday collaborating on how to solve some of the industry's most pressing issues so that all types of sorghum can be brought to full commercial market production in coming years.

Thursday and Friday will be field trip days, giving conference attendees the opportunity to see sweet sorghum and cellulosic sorghum plots at Texas A&M University and Verenim's biomass conversion plant at Jennings, Louisiana.

HIGHLIGHTS:

"This conference is a major step for the sorghum industry. The world is taking notice of this crop in a big way and this conference is a meeting of the minds, so to speak, of some of the finest scientists and entrepreneurs in the world. We will all need to work together to solve the energy crisis and this meeting moves us in the right direction."
Tim Lust, NSP CEO

"The case for biofuels rests on the proposition that it can enhance national security and economic well being."

Mr. David Fleischaker, Oklahoma Secretary of Energy, keynote speaker

The International Conference on Sorghum for Biofuels is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Texas A&M University, the National Sorghum Producers, Brazil's Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, and Tsinghua University in the Peoples' Republic of China, and the National Science Foundation.

DDG's from an ethanol plant that uses sorghum.