WEF Biofuel Debate: Dead End or Silver Bullet?
"We need to unpack these issues instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater." – Rahul Iyer, Founder, Primafuel

Davos, Switzerland, January 30, 2008 - The recent growth of biofuel production has caused a heated debate at this year’s WEF. At a conversation about climate change hosted by Google, opponents blamed the biofuel industry for being a climate killer and a threat to food and water supplies, while advocates praised the new EU fuel standards and the contributions that biofuels have made toward CO2 reduction.

The debate prompted biofuel companies such as the WEF Technology Pioneer Award winner Primafuel to call for a more solutions-oriented approach:

"Biofuels have truly taken a beating lately. However, people are starting to understand that we need to learn from these problems instead of throwing out the baby with the cradle. We can do so by searching for biofuels that are made from waste instead of edible feedstock and by monitoring sustainabilty across the entire biofuel supply chain," said Rahul Iyer, Executive Vice President of Primafuel.

Primafuel is a technology company from California who attended the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting to receive the Technology Pioneer Award. The award recognized Primafuel’s insistence on examining the entire fuel supply chain and its commitment to developing new low-carbon biofuels. The company’s modular infrastructure concept also gained praise from the awarding committee.

Among the Primafuel management attending the WEF were Rahul Iyer, Primafuel’s VP of Technology, as well as Brook Porter, VP of Operations, and Eyal Gutentag, VP of Finance. At the Google Climate Change Conversation, the team met with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, biofuel investment expert Vinod Khosla and other throughtleaders of the technology and renewable energy fields. Primafuel’s next destination will be the WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions that will be held in Tianjin, People’s Republic of China from September 25-27, 2008.

Environmental topics have set the tone at this year’s World Economic Forum. According to an official WEF document, the biofuels debate was among 28 sessions on environmental topics that were held across its meeting program, 70% more than in 2007. For the first time, biofuels were also among the technologies that were honored at this year’s WEF Technology Pioneer Award.


About Primafuel
California-based Primafuel is inventing better biofuels. Primafuel brings together an international team of award-winning biofuels experts in the pursuit of zero-carbon biofuels. Primafuel owns patent-pending technologies that improve the biofuels production process along every step of the fuel supply-chain. Such innovations include waste-stream recycling, scalable and modular refineries, carbon-tracking infrastructure and the use of next-generation feedstocks. In 2007 Primafuel was awarded the state of California’s largest biofuels production grant towards construction of a $90 million biofuel production facility at the Port of Sacramento. Primafuel is a privately-held corporation with labs in California and Europe and business operations in New York and Asia. On the Web: www.primafuel.com.

For a media kit, visit http://www.gcpr.de/downloads_en/primafuel_downloads.html
Press coverage about Primafuel
Information about the WEF Technology Pioneers 2008

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