The Bioenergy event will be held March 18-19, 2014 in the Grand Ballroom North of the Omni Hotel at CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia. This is the same location as the 2012 Bioenergy event.

Bioenergy Fuels & Products Conference & Expo immediately precedes the Panel & Engineered Lumber International Conference & Expo (PELICE), which will be held March 20-21, also in the Grand Ballroom North of the Omni Hotel. Both events are supported by Wood Bioenergy and Panel World magazines, and Georgia Research Institute.

The Bioenergy Conference & Expo also announced its first round of keynote speakers. They include Rick Holley, CEO, Plum Creek Timber; John Campbell, managing director, Rollcast Energy; Bill Gaston, principal, Wood Resource Recovery; Steven Hall, senior project manager, ReEnergy Holdings; Malcolm Swanson, president, ASTEC, Inc.

Additional general session keynoters will be announced soon. In addition to the keynoters, some 50 speakers will address a range of technologies and issues in the wood energy fields of wood pellets, biomass power, biofuels, and feedstock and procurement.

The final agenda will be announced this month, but already confirmed are two panel sessions. One is “The Industrial Wood Pellet Sector: An Overview from the U.S. Forest to the UK and EU Power Plant,” to be chaired by Dr. William Strauss, president of FutureMetrics; and “Fire Safety for Pellet Manufacturing and Port Terminal Storage, Handling and Ship Loading,” to be chaired by Lou Boos, president, Nordic Engineering.

The exhibitor portion of the event was already two-thirds sold out four months before the event. The Grand Ballroom North can field approximately 75 exhibits, which are immediately adjacent the session meeting rooms. Half the exhibitors will participate in both the Bioenergy and PELICE conferences because their technologies and services apply to both.

Exhibiting in one or both conferences is once again built within a Gold-Silver-Bronze sponsorship framework, which includes hotel rooms at the Omni, conference registrations and of course the exhibit space itself.

Following the 2012 Bioenergy event, a survey of attendees revealed that:

• 96% rated the event as either good or excellent.
• 100% rated the quality of exhibitors as either good or excellent.
• 100% said they definitely or possibly found something that would be useful for their business during their discussions with exhibitors.