The fourth edition of the International Conference on Renewable Resources & Biorefineries will be held in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), from Sunday June 1st to Wednesday afternoon June 4th 2008.  Based on the previous RRB conferences, this conference is expected to attract about 500 international participants from more than 30 countries.

The conference will provide a forum  for leading political, corporate, academic and financial people to discuss development and set up collaborations. The conference further aims to provide an overview of the scientific, technical, economical, environmental and social issues of renewable resources and biorefineries. The conference language will be English.

The congress theme is “Biobased is real”.

Topics

The conference program will cover the following topics:

Feedstock design and production

• Plant biotechnology and genomics for the design of biomass feedstocks
• Agriculture, agronomy, forestry and silviculture in relation to feedstock production
• Utilisation of organic residues
   

Biomass treatment and conversion

• Biomass pretreatment and fractionation, including chemical and physical methods
• Enzymatic hydrolysis of biomass to sugars, including novel enzyme discovery
• Biological and chemical conversion of sugars to chemicals and other bioproducts (including fermentation, metabolic engineering of microbes and novel catalysts)
• Thermochemical conversion technologies, including gasification and pyrolysis of biomass, as well as cleaning and conditioning of the resultant gaseous or liquid fuels
• Optimisation of biodiesel quality and stability, including use as a fuel additive   

Industrial development

• A systems approach to growing, harvesting, supplying and processing biomass into products
• Matching biobased products with market needs, including institutional and consumer/market barriers to the increased use of biobased products
• Sustainability and communication of biobased fuels and chemicals, including sustainability framework and criteria development
• Integrating the production of food, feed and traditional forest products with biobased fuels and chemicals
• Implications of expanding biobased fuel and chemical production for the forest and agriculture sectors, including land use competition as well as symbiotic interactions
   

Business and commercial news content

• Updates on fossil fuels and other traditional sources of fuel and chemicals
    

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Keynote speakers:

• Jacqueline Cramer,  Environment Minister, the Netherlands
• Chris Somerville, Professor UC Berkeley and director EBI
• Jan van der Eijk, Chief Technology Officer, Shell
• Gerda Verburg, Agriculture Minister, The Netherlands
• Luís Augusto Barbosa Cortez, Professor Agricultural Engineering, UNICAMP, Brazil