Saturday, January 17, 2009

Another potential barrier to biofuel commercialization

Based on Brent Erickson, the executive vice president of BIO’s Industrial & Environmental Section, a cellulosic biorefinery that produces both advanced biofuels and biobased products could create as many as 2,200 new jobs and increase economic activity by more than $1 billion.
This is a good news!
However, this will not become true until a real biorefinery plant nearly take off. Before that, a series of barriers need to be overcome. In addtion to the technical, engineering, financial, and market issue, a key factor to be easily overlooked is the technical resources. We are not lack of people but we are lack of technical professionals who have been well trained with solid and sound fundemental understanding of the technology.
When biofuels become a hot spot, it seems that thousands of biofuel specialists are available in the market overnight.
However, it is not difficult to find that quite a lot of them are not real experts. Unfortunately, they are in the position to provide advices, suggestions to the government, company managers or make decision by themselves. As a result, some key technology development or technology commercilization is delayed; some companies go to wrong direction; some companies have to be closed due to the bad decision..... Just like a diagnosis for a patient from a "fake" doctor, the patient treatment was delayed, or wrong description was given to the patient. What a result can we expect from this?
As a result, the time has been wasted; the money has been wasted, the opportunities has passed; and a lot of related people got hurt, i.e. human resources was also wasted.
It is so-called 'a busines can both succeed and fail because of human resources!'

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