 We'll go ahead and start, this is our last panel of the day, pretty amazing that we're going to start even a minute early. But anyway, I want to thank you all for being here and hope that this, that today has been a good learning experience for you, a chance to talk to exhibitors both in the Gold Room in 2168 as well as the FOIA, we've tried to cover a whole raft of technologies, ways to think about clean energy, renewable energy, energy efficiency, what it means in terms of manufacturing, what's happening in terms of economic investments with regard to jobs, etc. And so this last panel is going to really look at biosolutions, looking at biobased energy and biobased materials. And so we have six speakers and so we want to start going through to really look at all of this because I think there is a lot of exciting information that is available and that is continuously evolving in this important area. And actually in Arlington right now, the Department of Energy is holding a two-day conference on biomass technologies, all sorts of research and new products and technologies that are becoming available. So to start us off this afternoon is Jim Lemon, who is the co-founder and CEO of BTR Energy. And so he is going to be talking about electricity generated with biogas. So just remember, there is no such thing as waste if we use it right. Okay, thank you Carol and thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak today. You probably know that the EPA's Renewable Fuel Standard Program, or RFS Program, is a statutory program that commenced in 2005 and it requires increasing percentages of renewable transportation fuel to be used in the United States and is commonly known as the ethanol program. But do you remember the exciting one-of-a-kind RFS development that occurred three years ago next Tuesday? If you don't, you're forgiven because nothing really happened. Actually, a final rule was published on that date three years ago by EPA and some very noteworthy things were supposed to have happened since then, but they didn't. For the first time, a nonchemical fuel electricity was to be included in the RFS program. For the first time, parties generating electricity with biogas produced from stuff that nobody wants, manure, like manure and rotting food waste and sewage, were to be included in the RFS program. And for the first time, vehicles that don't burn fuel and don't have tailpipes, i.e. electric vehicles, were to be included in the RFS program. When you put it all together from beginning to end, what it was, and what it is, is an official RFS fuel pathway with many environmental, economic, and energy attributes, and it's called the RFS Renewable Electricity Pathway, we call it the Electric Pathway, but it still hasn't been plugged in. How would it work? Well, in a nutshell, the Electric Pathway works by pairing or matching electricity produced with biogas, with electric vehicles that are consuming electricity on the same connected grid, in accordance with the RFS rules. And of course, biogas is composed largely of methane that is collected from decomposing organic material that can be at a farm, at a wastewater treatment plant, and other facilities that process the waste through anaerobic digesters are also called biodigesters. And biogas is also collected from many landfills that are filled with decomposing waste. Under the RFS, participating pathways must show that biogas-based electricity was used as transportation fuel, and that would allow them to generate and sell RENS, which are the credits that are purchased by the obligated parties, and under the RFS program, the obligated parties are gasoline and diesel refiners and importers. So they can sell these RENS and earn extra cents per kilowatt for their renewable electricity that they're generating. So that in a nutshell is the program. Now the RFS Electric Pathway has tremendous potential environmental, economic, and energy attributes that this administration should love. How would they love it? Let me count the ways. Let's talk about energy attributes. First-based American-made renewable power is fully aligned with an all-of-the-above energy policy, and implementation of the electric pathway would increase domestic energy production. And according to the EPA, every 100 miles driven in an electric vehicle eliminates the need for four gallons of gasoline. That will help reduce the need for imported oil. So that's motherhood in apple pie. And those two things, increasing domestic energy production and ensuring the nation's geopolitical security, those two things are line-item goals in the president's recent executive order on promoting energy independence and economic growth. So that should make President Trump happy. Now generating electricity with biogas results in domestic energy production, distributed energy, and base load power. There are about 2,000 facilities doing this right now in the United States with the support from this electric pathway we could add another 11,000 facilities. That should make Secretary Perry happy. And let's talk about economic attributes. On the micro-level, farmers that use bio-digesters to produce electricity with biogas from manure can reduce or eliminate their own need to purchase electricity, fuel, and fertilizer. And they can actually sell the electricity back to the grid. This results in improved economic viability of farms and rural communities, and it creates additional agriculture revenues and jobs. That ought to make Agriculture Secretary Perdue happy. The electric pathway can improve the economic viability of urban communities by creating additional income streams at their municipal wastewater treatment plants and landfills because both of those entities can generate biogas. And with the biogas, they can generate electricity just like a dairy farmer can with manure. Local governments everywhere would like those things. We right now are generating enough organic waste in this country to provide feedstock for thousands of additional biodigesters that could be built at farms and communities across the country. They can capture the methane, turn it into waste, and generate renewable electricity. It can catalyze the construction of thousands of new renewable, rural and urban anaerobic digesters and tens of thousands of jobs to build and operate them. And it could create a new domestic bioenergy and bioproducts industry. On the environmental attributes side, another one of the line item goals in the President's executive order on energy independence is to quote, promote clean air and clean water for the American people. Well implementation of the electric pathway can help achieve cleaner inner city air from the zero emissions that the electric vehicles and buses could bring to those communities and the related improvements in public health. This pathway will increase demand for methane at farms, landfills and wastewater treatment plants where it is currently being flared or wasted or simply vented into the atmosphere. The pathway will provide much better options for management of human, animal, food and other organic wastes. This pathway, and this is very important, it can reduce surface and groundwater pollution from agriculture waste. And that's a big problem. We do have water pollution in this country and agriculture plays a part in it. And you can certainly make the argument that if we want to make America great again, we need to make the Gulf of Mexico and Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes great again by cleaning them up. This pathway would help do that. Now finally, what would the impact be on the RFS program itself? Well without going into a lot of detail, let me just say that implementation of this pathway would increase the amount of cellulosic biofuel produced under that program. The cellulosic biofuels have the lowest greenhouse gas emissions. And if you know anything about the RFS program, you know that more cellulosic biofuel is badly needed. In closing, the obvious bad news is that the electric pathway has never been implemented and therefore never been used by a single dairy farmer, a landfill, or an electric car or bus. Apparently it simply has not been a high priority at the EPA for almost three years and counting, even though it has all of the attributes described above and more. The good news is that the electric pathway is literally a tool in Administrator Pruitt's closet. It requires no new legislation, no new regulations. It simply needs to be used and we are working hard to make sure that the Congress and Secretary Perdue and Secretary Perry and Administrator Pruitt know that this pathway is there at EPA and just begging to be used. And we believe the President and Administrator Pruitt will want to make this happen on their watch and soon. And if they do, it is certain to be something you will remember the next time you're asked about it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jim. We're now going to turn to Leslie Cortes, who is the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships with the Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves. This is an enormous issue across the world. Did you want to come up front during the breaks? You can sit. There are no more chairs. Chairs with your name on them. So thanks, Carol, and to everybody here for your attention. I'm going to talk about something that's a little bit different than the usual topic at one of these sessions and something you might not be familiar with. I'm going to talk about a problem that affects about 3 billion people every day on the planet, and that's the issue of lack of access to clean cooking. So many of you have traveled internationally. You've seen people, largely women and girls, cooking over open fires, breathing the smoke from these fires, often walking hundreds of miles a month to collect fuel for their families to cook. And this problem is something that affects most of the developing world, certainly all the countries where they cook over open fires and with solid fuel. It's a problem that has huge health impacts. About 4 million people every year die from diseases associated with breathing smoke. So diseases, you would imagine, connected with smoking or some of the same diseases that affect these women and children, pneumonia, lung cancer, heart disease, et cetera. The smoke is very toxic. There's no way to really avoid it if you're cooking over an open fire. And it's not confined, obviously, to the household. It also spreads to the ambient air pollution. It's a cause of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants as the fuel is burned and has trees are felled for fuel. And it's also an issue that affects women's livelihoods. Women aren't in school. People aren't in school because they're spending so much time collecting fuel. So that's the problem. That's why it's important because it is a cross-cutting issue. It's one that affects health, it affects gender, et cetera. But it's one, fortunately, that has the solution. And much of the solution involves renewable fuels. So I work for an organization called the Global Alliance for Clean Cooking. We have roughly 1,700 partners around the globe. Around 248 of them are based in the United States. These partners cover the gamut from research institutions to small enterprises, NGOs, large corporate partners, small developers of enterprise solutions. But they're all working around a common premise, and that's that access to clean energy is a human right. It's one that has enormous implications for the planet and one that we can do something about. So I'm going to be very brief, just talk a little bit about the Alliance and our role. We were founded in 2010, has an organization designed to address a lot of the issues surrounding the use of solid fuels but in conjunction with partners. So we don't actually do the work in the field. We support our partners. We have funding from a number of sources, foundations, individuals, governments, et cetera. And the work we do does a number of things. One promotes the use of clean fuels. And you can cook with solar, you can cook with ethanol, you can cook with clean pellets, you can cook with biogas from the waste, animal waste. All of these are cleaner fuels that can provide immediate relief to women and children in terms of how they breathe every day. So our work entails supporting enterprises, developing global standards, working to raise awareness among policymakers so that they understand how important this issue is. And in a lot of countries, because it's largely seen as a women's issue, it flies under the radar for a lot of the policymakers. So our work might entail kind of the global stage of big forums like Sustainable Energy for All or the World Health Assembly, but it also entails raising awareness about the importance of clean renewable fuels at the policy level or at the national level. One of the things we're most excited about is that we do work with a number of U.S. partners. So like I said, we have about 248 partners. That number continues to grow. And certainly many of those partners work with our international partners as well. But just to give you a sense of how these partners work, we've got research institutions like UC Berkeley or MIT or North Carolina State who are working to better understand the health impacts of open fire use for cooking and also the benefits of clean cooking. We have a number of organizations that are working on policy, everything from the Center for Disease Control, which is working with national governments to address this issue at the international level, to NREL in Colorado, which is working with us on tariff and tax structure to the big U.N. agencies based in New York. We have a lot of enterprises that are working to share American ingenuity with their counterparts in other countries, companies like Burn Design based in Washington State, which is working throughout Kenya, Africa, and India, Envirofit, which is based in Colorado, which is working on stoves addressing a number of different fuels, and then closer to Home Project Gaia, which is working with companies like Nova Zimes on ethanol fueled stoves. There are many U.S. partners that are also working on investment in clean cooking enterprises, so Acumen, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank of the Americas, et cetera, that are working to finance clean cooking solutions. And then finally, a number of companies are supporting clean cooking pilots in areas that they work in other countries. So for instance, Cummins, which is based in Indiana, is doing a number of pilot projects in India to share clean cooking technology as part of their smart cities program. Levi Strauss is providing clean cook stoves to their workers in Haiti as part of their health and wellness package that includes clean water kits, et cetera, but looks at cleaner biomass as an option for reducing health impacts. So in a nutshell, this is an issue we're happy to share more about. We have a booth down in the expo. It's something that we think really touches on a lot of the people in this room, even if it's not something that affects you in your daily lives, but it's certainly something that affects three billion people around the world. Thanks. Like I said, a terribly important problem. There are solutions, and that's what we all need to be about. So we're now going to hear from Ann Stuckel, who is the Vice President for Federal Affairs with the National Biodiesel Board. Well, thanks, Carol. Good afternoon, everyone. You guys are a hearty lot. It's the last panel session, but we have a lot of good content that I think everybody's going to be providing. So thanks for sticking with us to the bitter end. So as Carol said, I am Ann Stuckel with the National Biodiesel Board, and the National Biodiesel Board is the trade association that represents biodiesel and renewable diesel. Biodiesel and renewable diesel are the alternatives to diesel. They can be made from a variety of feedstocks, such as recycled restaurant grease, used cooking oil, animal fats, soybean oil, canola oil, and a variety of other feedstocks that we're working on right now through different technology processes. Jim talked a little bit about the renewable fuel standard. The renewable fuel standard is an incredibly important program for renewable fuels, such as biodiesel. It really allows our industries the opportunity to be able to grow and diversify. Obviously, we're competing against the diesel industry, which is the petroleum industry, certainly a highly entrenched industry, as we all know. So the renewable fuel standard really does offer these newer energy technologies the opportunity to be blended into the transportation supply system. So part of what we do at the National Biodiesel Board here in D.C. is really work on federal policy efforts, and again, the renewable fuel standard being pretty much our largest priority in terms of what we're working on right now. EPA goes through a yearly rulemaking process, during which time they set the standards for how much renewable fuels are going to be used in the transportation supply system. As you may have heard last week, a proposal was put out by EPA on our numbers. Unfortunately, they weren't the volumes that we were hoping for. The biomass-based diesel program was essentially flatlined, which for our industry is incredibly problematic as we want to be able to continue to grow and diversify the diesel market. We are an advanced biofuel, which means we reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% compared to regular petroleum. So we are also considered part of the advanced fuel, and the advanced biofuel program. So we fill most of the advanced program, obviously, as well as the biodiesel program. Most of advanced, when Congress originally put the statute in, was supposed to have a lot of growth in the cellulacic ethanol industry. Unfortunately, we really haven't seen the growth that I think folks in Congress had talked about initially, and so we've seen those volumes continue to be lowered over the last couple of years. What we're going to do as an industry is really talk about the benefits of our industry and the importance to really continue diversifying. I think when people talk about renewable fuels or the RFS, they think about ethanol, and it being the ethanol program. But when Congress wrote the statute back in 2007, the intent was really at this point in time to diversify off of the traditional conventional corn-based ethanol and move more into these advanced industries. And there's a lot of different technologies that are out there. So we're really going to focus on working with EPA to get those volumes up, so different renewable industries like ours will be able to continue to grow and diversify. We have plants in just about every state across the country, and so for us, this has been a really important jobs issue. We support over 50,000 jobs domestically, and so it's important that we have our numbers grow within the RFS so we can continue to grow and support jobs locally. Many of our jobs are in rural communities, but we also have a lot of jobs in urban areas as well, because we aren't just a corn-based ethanol fuel. We are running off recycled restaurant grease and animal fats. You see a lot of diversification into areas such as New York State. New York City actually has a city-wide mandate to use 2 percent, and they just increased it to 5 percent of a bioheat. And bioheat is a really cool new thing that's going on. For those of you that are from the Northeast or that now live in D.C., there's a lot of home heating oil that we use in this area and more in New York and Pennsylvania to heat homes. I'm from Illinois. We don't really have a lot of it there, but in the Northeast, this is a really growing part of our market, and what we do is we take biodiesel and we blend that into the home heating oil to be used in generators and things like that, and it really cleans the air because, again, it is an advanced biofuel which reduces greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent. So we think we have a lot of exciting, innovative things going on, so we're going to continue to work and continue to grow the renewable fuel standard and figure out how it works best for our industry. The other issue that our industry works very hard on is the biodiesel tax incentive. It's a tax incentive that is a dollar gallon that allows when blended to whoever blends the fuel to receive the dollar gallon. And so this really makes it a lot more cost competitive when compared to regular petroleum diesel. Unfortunately, that tax credit did expire, as most tax credits did expire last year that had typically been in an extenders package, and so as Congress kind of weaves its way around and maybe do tax reform or may go back to tax extenders, we're going to be working with our supporters on Capitol Hill to ensure that our tax package, that any kind of tax package, does include a biodiesel tax credit. An important part of that reform of the tax credit is moving it to a production tax credit. And this would ensure that only fuel that is produced domestically receives access to that dollar a gallon. What we're seeing right now is a lot of fuel come in from other countries such as Argentina and Indonesia, which then receives our dollar a gallon tax incentive. So this fuel is subsidized in its own home markets, and then it comes in and dumps and dumps and subsidized prices, and then displaces our domestic production. And so it's essential as Congress thinks about tax reform, how they can really look comprehensively at these tax incentives and ensure that the tax credits and that our tax dollars actually go to incentivized production here at home. We're about a three billion gallon industry, and last year a billion of that was from imports. So for our industry it is an issue of great concern and something that we're going to continue to monitor and keep our eyes on. I promise Carol I'd keep to my limited time frame, so I will end with that, but happy to take questions if anybody has any at the end. Thank you. And I think one of the things that is so important is that with regard to thinking about the renewable fuel standard is that there are so many different sources in feedstocks that are starting to really come in now with regard to that standard. And so it really provides an opportunity for greater diversification on the fuel side. So hope you will keep that in mind and ask our speakers questions about that later if you have them. And so I now want to turn to Arlen Peters who is the head of sustainability for North America for Nova Zimes. And this is a company that again provides all sorts of applications in terms of their industrial processes and the work that they're doing with enzymes that enable all sorts of other things on materials and fuels to happen. Thank you. So thank you Carol. You actually gave my speech, that's pretty much it. But really I don't know, how many folks here have heard of enzymes before and heard of Nova Zimes? Just kind of get it. Wow. Okay. So that's probably like twice as many as the general population. When I say have you heard of enzymes, have you heard of Nova Zimes? Maybe like one out of a hundred will have heard of who we are. But enzymes actually are in almost every product that touches your lies. So if you've worn some stonewashed jeans like my friend over here, enzymes were used in making that product. If you've had a loaf of bread, probably about 95% of loaf bread uses enzymes as a way of extending shelf life and thus reducing food waste. If you've driven on a gallon of gasoline, enzymes have been used and are used to make the ethanol that goes into a portion of your gasoline. So that type of catalytic ability is in a lot of areas in our lives. Nova Zimes is headquartered in the United States in North Carolina. We have a pretty large manufacturing facility down there, have all of our business units in that area. And basically what we do is we find biological answers to solve the world's problems. That primarily comes in the form of enzymes, as I mentioned before. But we also get into microorganisms, which is the use of the whole organism to find some kind of beneficial impact. Primarily use as use in agricultural products. I'm head of sustainability and I'm very happy to let you know that sustainability is a big part of our company. That's reflected in our goals, so we try very hard to reduce the environmental impacts of our own company with specific focus on water use and energy use. So by 2020, we aim to reduce or improve our energy efficiency by 25% and also improve our water efficiency by 25%. We also think that our products have a lot to do with meeting global reductions of CO2. And so we have a pretty ambitious target of reducing 100 million tons of CO2 with the use of our products. So that kind of brings me to this next report, which I would like to highlight. If you came to our booth last year, we talked about sort of this wide variety of applications and we talked about, okay, what are the CO2 reduction possibilities for each of those applications? But this year, what we are trying to do is basically look at what happens when you apply an integrated approach using various biotechnology solutions in agriculture. And we call it the one-acre study. And so our basic premise here is if you look at an acre of land and look at sort of the conventional way that we are using that land and what we're getting out of it, and then you take a variety of biotechnology solutions and apply it to that, what can you expect to gain? And I think the result is pretty significant, and you can see it in this sort of summary right here. A bunch of these at our desk, the table, is it table 20 over here in four-year, the four-year out there. But we started off with the idea that that acre of land would be producing corn, average about 152 bushels of corn per acre. And most of that corn, all that corn would be going towards providing feed for chickens, chicken production. It's a very efficient use of animal feed. And if we look at inoculant technology, which is, as I mentioned before, the use of micro organisms to enhance yields, we can get about a 2% increase in yields from that land. And then you take the additions, basically what you're producing in addition to that or in addition to what's already been produced there. And you use that to make a variety of things. You can use that to make starch-based ethanol, so ethanol from corn. You can use enzyme technology to also make cellulosic ethanol. So taking the corn stover from that land, about 30% of that corn stover, and using that to produce cellulosic ethanol. You can take enzymes, and I have a friend of mine here in the poultry business, and use that to improve the digestibility of animal feed. So chickens are able to get more nutrients out of the feed that they're consuming. What that does is make that one acre of land much, much more productive. And because you're using fuels that offset gasoline, one of those fuels is biodiesel. You can also get some biodiesel out of that. You're able to save a lot of greenhouse gases. So we calculate, I won't go to all the details, but we calculate that you get about one metric ton of greenhouse gases saved per acre by using a variety of these biological solutions. When you expand that and think about, okay, what if you scale this up to the rest of the country? So not just one acre. We calculate that you could get about 87 million metric tons of CO2 savings, which is about 18 million cars off the road for one year. So not an insignificant amount of beneficial environmental impact. So basically what we're interested in is how do you think about biological solutions not just isolated, but the synergies of these biological solutions? And what can you do with that? So looking forward to the questions afterwards. And also if you have more questions, feel free to come and see us at our booth down there in the foyer. Thank you. Thank you. And now we are going to turn to David Bederman, who is Executive Director of SWANA, which stands for the Solid Waste Association of North America. Thank you, Kara. So since Arlen did a survey about enzymes, I have to do this. How many of you have heard of SWANA? Okay, we got three. That's great. Two of them work for me. So SWANA is the Solid Waste Association of North America. We have about 9,000 members in the United States and Canada. We're the largest waste-related association in the world. And our members include people in all 50 states. It includes people who work for big companies that you've heard of, like Waste Management, local governments like the District Plummies Department of Public Works, and thousands of communities in between. And our strategic plan at SWANA, and it relates to this exposition, it states that the association's purpose is to advance the responsible management of solid waste. See, solid waste is actually a resource. Yeah, we throw it away, but our industry is trying to extract value from it. So we recycle a third, or more than a third, 34.5% of what Americans generate. And a lot of the things that we don't recycle become feedstock for energy. And there's two places where that happens. It happens in landfills, and it happens at energy for waste facilities, which some people refer to as incinerators. And I'll talk about those in a minute or two. Now, the waste that we generate here in the District of Columbia, or we generate where I live in Fairfax County, or some of you probably live in Montgomery County. Those materials all go to energy from waste facilities. Waste is a feedstock for electricity, and the industry is very interested in extracting as much value from that, both because it's the right thing to do, and because there's an economic benefit in doing so. The waste sector is remarkably innovative and progressive. More than half of the new trucks placed into service in the waste industry in 2016 are not fueled by diesel, they're fueled by alternative fuels, mostly natural gas. Now, a few months ago, I had the privilege of speaking at a renewable energy conference down in Cuba, and I'm glad that I went when I did, because apparently it's gonna be tougher to go to Cuba moving forward. That's the extent of my political statements, by the way, I hope. But at the conference, which was attended by people throughout the Caribbean, they were surprised to hear that renewable energy could be derived from waste, and that it's an important portion of the renewable energy portfolio here in the United States. It's often overlooked, like people know about solar and wind and hydro, those are the sexier renewable energies. But there are days when the wind doesn't blow, and there are days when the sun doesn't shine. And what do we always generate in the United States every single day? Trash. We always generate trash, a lot of it, 260 million tons of it every year. And despite our best efforts as a society, the amount of waste that we generate goes up every year, partially because of population growth. So coming up with ways to extract energy from that waste, from that feedstock, is vitally, vitally important. And in recent years, we've seen an increased interest in a new line of business relating to the waste sector where energy is extracted. Some of the previous speakers referred to biodigesters or digesters in agricultural settings, there's an increased interest in diverting food waste separately from the regular municipal solid waste because that has a high energy value. And on the west coast and on big cities in the northeast, we're starting to see some of those projects come into fruition. So some numbers for you, there are about 650 landfills in the United States that generate renewable energy. That's according to the US EPA's ELMOP data. ELMOP stands for Landfill Methane Outreach Program. There's about 77 energy from waste facilities. If you've ever driven up I-95 past Baltimore and you've seen that big smoke stack on the left side of the road right before the Inner Harbor, that's Baltimore's Waste to Energy Facility. Most of the waste for energy from waste facilities in the United States are located either in the northeast, Florida or the upper Midwest. The reason for that is in the northeast, land is expensive and it's difficult to site landfills. In Florida, it's because the water table is very high, so it's difficult to build landfills. I see somebody in the back nodding. And in the upper Midwest, they have always had a very progressive ethos about not going to landfill as their predominant method of waste disposal. Some numbers about the benefits of these processes. Just from the landfills, just from the 650 landfills that generate energy, they generate the equivalent of the energy that fuel 4 million houses. It's the equivalent of the CO2 emissions from 4 billion, that's with a B, 4 billion gallons of gasoline. It's the equivalent of carbon sequestration of 37 million acres of forest. In the energy from waste sector, the energy from waste sector, where about 12% of America's waste is disposed of, it generates 14 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. That's a lot of electricity, guys. And just one company in the sector, Covanta, which I assume some of you have heard of, it's the largest in the space. They produce just by themselves 1 million homes worth of electricity. And we're even starting to see some of the gas from landfills start to be made into fuel stock and used in the transportation as a transportation fuel for the garbage trucks. So a garbage truck goes to a landfill in California, tips its load, and then fuels up from fuel generated from garbage disposed there years ago, closing the loop completely in our sector. There are three principal obstacles to increasing the amount of waste-based renewable energy. The first one is economic. It's the low price of energy. We thrive in a world of $100 a barrel fuel. At $50 a barrel, it's more difficult to compete. And we've seen a flattening out of new projects coming online. Secondly, and it was referenced earlier, the tax treatment of both capital investment and the energy generated through alternative fuels is now, there's some uncertainty about that. That's been to our detriment as alternative fuels get caught up in the tax reform situation. And then thirdly, there's rampant opposition to waste facilities. Nobody wants to live next to anything related to the waste sector. You've heard of NIMBY, right? But how many of you have heard of banana? Banana is, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody. That's what we face in our sector. We could be making gold in our facilities. But trucks have to bring that stuff in, and then the truck leaves. And it's the emissions from the trucks that cause problems. So those are the three principal obstacles that we face. But the industry is very progressive and innovative using data and technology to derive more value out of both the energy as well as operate more efficiently. And I know many of you are fascinated by this and want to learn more about it. We have our big national conference coming up in September in Baltimore, right up the road. You can drive right past the incinerator there. We'd love to continue the conversation with any of you and of course answer any questions that you may have. Thank you very much. And like I said earlier, if we use things in a responsible, sustainable way, there is no such thing as waste. It is a resource. I'm always reminded by the country of Denmark, which has no landfills, because they make a point in terms of all of their different kinds of policies and their hierarchy of policies to make sure that they basically make use of everything. So whether it's landfills, whether it is food processing, looking at just food waste coming out of grocery stores or whatever, or looking at wastewater treatment plants, there are all sorts of sources where we've got the ability to make use of these resources for energy that create new revenue streams too. So anyway, we'll now move to our final speaker for this panel and hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for Q&A. And our final speaker is Claude Convisser. Convisser. Convisser, okay. Who is the CEO and General Counsel for Plant Oil Powered Diesel or Pop Diesel. Claude. Thank you, Carol. And thank you all for being here at the end of the afternoon. I'd also like to thank our host, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses, the Sustainable Energy Coalition and the Environment and Energy Study Institute. Now it's my turn to ask the same question. How many of you have ever heard of the Jatropha tree or Jatropha plant oil? All right. A couple. That's fantastic. All right. Well, pure Jatropha plant oil coming from the fruit seeds of the tropical Jatropha tree, inedible fruit seeds, performs better in a diesel engine running at 100% concentration in a Pop Diesel inexpensively equipped engine, performs better than petroleum diesel fuel, will cost 50 cents a gallon less and is the only 100% renewable solution for engines in the heavy-duty sector of the economy. Trucks, locomotives, ships and other heavy equipment. Because electric motors mounted on a mobile platform don't generate enough torque to move a heavy-duty load. In my remarks on this panel last year, which are posted to the homepage of Pop Diesel's website, I explained why and how Jatropha plant oil coming from trees grown in West Africa alone is capable, in theory, of replacing all of the petroleum diesel consumed in the United States, about 22% of worldwide supply if it's running in Pop Diesel equipped engines. With those advantages, you would think that policies and regulations would welcome this fuel and engine equipment to the U.S. market, but they don't. They block it. And the primary culprit is the tailpipe rule, which is the way by which fuel economy, cafe standards for cars and trucks, and also greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy-duty and light-duty truck and car engines are measured by looking only at tailpipe carbon dioxide. What the fuel economy standards do is they take that tailpipe measure of carbon dioxide and then they calculate a measure of petroleum fuel consumption in order to get the fuel economy standards that you've all heard of. On the greenhouse gas side, I think folks generally understand that when you're looking at the global warming impact or the mitigation value of an energy source or a fuel, you need to look at the life cycle. So a pure plant-based fuel is getting the hydrocarbon that this is, plant hydrocarbon oil. The carbon is coming from the plants extracting the carbon from the atmosphere. So the life cycle, although it's producing carbon out the tailpipe, the life cycle impact is very low. Petroleum, of course, is taking fossilized carbon that's been in the earth for hundreds of millions of years, combusting it and releasing that to the atmosphere. But because the tailpipe rule causes the federal regulatory agencies to look only at tailpipe carbon emissions, that benefits petroleum, because petroleum produces lower tailpipe carbon emissions than plant oil fuel does. So we are barred, essentially, from ever getting EPA certification on new engines because we can never satisfy the... we can never meet the tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions that petroleum can, because it makes lower tailpipe carbon dioxide, even though our fuel has much lower overall greenhouse gas emissions and, in fact, the lowest of any source for heavy-duty engines, so half as low as biodiesels. The other blockage that we face, principally, is at the renewable fuel standard, which you've heard about some this morning, blocks, Jatropha plant oil from being imported from Africa and Asia. And I won't go into the reasons for that during this time. But because of these blockages that are fuel phases, which are essentially put in place to favor petroleum and fuels that blend in subordination with petroleum and keep out 100% renewable alternative for diesel engines, excuse me, we've had to think outside of the box. And speaking of which, I don't know if any of you saw this op-ed piece, June 20th in the Washington Post, by George Shultz and Larry Summers, saying that a carbon tax is the inevitable solution for climate change. So given that, these luminaries say that Congress is eventually going to have to focus on a carbon tax. I'd like to offer a few pointers on a proposal that Pop Diesel has developed for an America-first comprehensive worldwide fossil fuel tax. First thing that we recommend happen is that the petroleum fuel market needs to be opened up to 100% alternatives like pure plant oil. And I might add that Volvo Trucks agrees with Pop Diesel that the CAFE standards and the fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and trucks disincentivize them as an engine manufacturer from developing new engines to run on lower carbon alternatives to petroleum. So in place of the CAFE standards, Congress, if it would like to encourage Detroit to make better engines, can adopt engine efficiency standards where engine efficiency is the measure of energy in terms of BTUs or calories going into an engine regardless of the fuel per unit of work performed. And that would be a way to get better engines produced from Detroit that would not have the deleterious effects that I've described. The second thing that we would recommend for a carbon tax proposal in order to make it work is once the carbon tax is there leveling the playing field, there's no further need for these credits and subsidies that right now support fossil fuels as well as renewable energy sources, the renewable fuel standard credits, solar and hydro power, wind power, those credits are no longer needed and each of those has a distorting effect and we're sort of the poster child for a product and a company that hasn't received the blessing of Congress or EPA to get any of these credits and it's distorting the market. So the third topic is that since Congress is only going to look at a carbon tax once, you might as well make the remedy as broad as possible. There are certain industrial processes such as the calcining of lime that produce carbon dioxide emissions regardless of fossil fuel combustion. That should be taxed. The agriculture sector contributes 12% of overall US greenhouse gas emissions for man-made sources. So tax each head of cattle for the methane that cows burp which is actually believe it or not a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Also there could be a tax credit to encourage farmers to purchase no-till farm plows and other no-till equipment. Fourth step is we get to the worldwide portion of the America first comprehensive worldwide fossil fuel tax. Congress in addition to imposing a tax on the extraction of domestic fossil fuels and on their import to the United States can require every other country in the world to reciprocate by adopting the same kind of tax. Global warming is a global problem. It requires a worldwide solution. The US can do this. We have the influence to cause other countries to do this. There's a couple of examples. Under human rights law, the Secretary of State audit or verifies other countries' human rights performance if a country is failing, the president is authorized to impose sanctions. Similarly the US essentially requires other countries to adopt transparent banking practices and if they don't go along with that their banks can be excluded from international banking transactions. There's no person better than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil to take a look at the Russian and Saudi state dominated petroleum companies books and determine whether they are paying their due tax that Congress would have imposed on the US fossil fuel sector, whether those companies are paying their tax to their domestic governments and if they're not then the US can impose duties on the import of their products and similarly we would require other countries participating in this regime to impose duties of their own on these countries' products based on the audit that the US Secretary of State can do. Now we get to the America first portion of this. If Congress goes along with this program of having a worldwide tax that the US would essentially foist upon other countries in the world and the Canadians adopted a reciprocal fossil fuel tax of their own, Canadian petroleum would be taxed domestically in Canada and on import to the United States for that petroleum from Canada that came into the US. So Canadian petroleum sold in the US would have twice the tax burden of domestically, US domestically produced petroleum. So that's going to advantage and favor American fossil fuel production and consumption of our own fossil fuel resources here in the US. The carbon tax proposals that I've seen put forth by people like Senator Bernie Sanders, the R Street Institute, the Climate Leadership Council led by George Schultz and Jim Baker all are just simply a domestic fossil fuel tax and they would require a federal bureaucracy either the Treasury or the EPA to have conduct a very mammoth rulemaking to determine the carbon and energy intensive content of products that are traded in commerce. American manufacturers who are exporting those products would be reimbursed a portion of the tax and then importers from other countries who are bringing high intensity energy or carbon products to the US would be taxed upon those products entry to the US. There's three problems with that scheme. First is it would be a very difficult rulemaking for a federal bureaucracy to undertake. Secondly, administratively, it's very difficult to manage. How do you reimburse all these taxes and tax additional products that are crossing the border all the time? And third, it places American businesses in the middle of enforcing this kind of a carbon tax. Why? Because if an American manufacturer feels disadvantaged that they are paying too much of the tax or if they see a competitor from another country who's importing a product to the US that is not being taxed enough it's up to the American business to petition the American Government Agency be a Treasury EPA who had adopted this rule and seek an adjustment in the tax that way. And third, if Congress adopts what I've proposed is the reciprocal tax requiring other countries to adopt a reciprocal tax it's then up to the foreign countries and the foreign companies to challenge this regime in the World Trade Organization and American businesses are taken out of it. This whole scheme should be compliant with the World Trade Organization if the US is imposing a tax not only on import of fossil fuels but also on domestic extraction. So one of the things here to wrap this up is that if Congress moves forward to adopt a reciprocal tax system like this requiring other countries to adopt the same tax package as us and enforcing it then we will see fossil fuel producing countries start to reduce their tax burden in anticipation of imposition of a later tax that would be required or encouraged by Congress's action we already saw that actually possibly because in March of this year whether true or not there were rumors circulating that the White House was going to propose a carbon tax as part of tax reform and the Saudis went ahead all of a sudden and reduced their domestic tax on Saudi Aramco Oil by 80%. So what you'd have to do to counter that would be to have the audit date by which the Secretary of State would be looking at other countries and whether they were imposing a domestic tax would have to be retroactive to say January 1st of this year so that would mean that the Saudis would have to essentially reimpose their 80% tax plus the additional increment that Congress would be imposing on domestic fossil fuel producers and I'm sorry for Saudi Arabian friends but that's the only way to treat American fossil fuel producers fairly. Coal is treated disproportionately with any carbon tax that is assessed according to the carbon content of the fuel. At today's market prices the tax on coal would be 10 times what it would be on petroleum so it would be necessary to phase in the carbon tax on coal and also out of any revenue neutral fossil fuel tax system that's adopted why not take a portion of the revenues and devote them to hard hit coal areas in West Virginia and Wyoming and help President Trump to meet one of his campaign pledges to support those areas. The last thing I'll say and thank you very much for listening to me rattle on about this is that it doesn't really matter what quantity of tax is imposed whether it's $10 a metric ton or $100 a metric ton provided the tax is increasing over time that's what creates the proper incentive. The key is really to get this started as soon as possible because we are sort of running out of time. Thank you so much. We are running out of time. So anyway, if anybody has any questions we could take maybe two questions really quickly. Okay, those two questions so we'll start Barbara first and then you, okay. A conversation worth having. Do you guys want to just very quickly do like a lightning respond? Do you want to start? Sure, yeah. I think there's definitely some validity and some validity is very important in our industry and I think that's one of the things that I think is really important and I think that's one of the things that I think is really important and one of the things that we certainly think our industry and so having continue that. I would concur. I think Nova Zimes has been a part of this conversation for quite a while when you all were sort of putting together the standards to begin with and I think that that is one of the messages that needs to get out there is that these fuel sources are sustainable and we should ensure that they are. I would think the waste sector would be supportive of participating in some sort of externally facing activity that reflects the fact that not just our sector but my partners or co-panelists view sustainability as something that's a goal but we have to be mindful of the fact that we can't be setting unreasonable goals as we move forward in that area. I don't speak for any particular industry but certainly the agricultural industry has different organizations I know that have sustainability standards such as the Dairy Council and groups like that so that's all really I have to say about that. Our role is a bit different but the Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves has been working with ISO the International Standardization Organization and ANSI to develop consensus global standards for cook stoves and define what truly is clean and allow for better understanding by consumers and investors etc has to what constitutes clean in terms of emissions and efficiency. If the renewable fuel standard is replaced by a fossil fuel tax then there will be a need for some mechanism to make sure that folks aren't going around and clear cutting rainforest in order to plant other kinds of trees. Your question. In order for the business to continue to gain profits off the incremental release of those kinds of consoles you draw it out so I was wondering for the gentleman from Nova Zimes have you seen a situation where you're in a lab and you have certain ingredients in the soil that makes food grow really really fast like tomatoes, corn things that families in DC could plant in their small yards that they have to try to offset the rising costs of food as a lot of people are having a hard time making ends meet have you seen anything like that like super food growth that's healthy and sustainable that we could implement right away? I don't know about super food growth but I think that's one of the challenges with the agriculture industry today is that we've gotten some diminishing returns with a lot of the technologies that are out there and so what we're trying to do is find new ways of increasing yields that haven't been developed before and the whole basis of this I talked about microorganisms and inoculant technology that is a very very new area that a lot of companies are looking into and we don't really know what the potential is out there in fact we don't really know we don't really understand the microbiome around us it's one of these sort of uncharted territories just now there's this whole human microbiome project that is looking at what different types of organisms are living on your body and how do those relate to your health well that's the human body but if you think about a teaspoon of soil they're literally like thousands and thousands and thousands of microbes in that teaspoon of soil and we've never looked into what they actually do so the hope is that by understanding that better we will come to technologies that can provide this super yield that you're talking about and obviously there is so much that still needs to be learned needs to be studied needs to be applied at the same time there are all sorts of technologies that are available that can make a huge difference now which we've been hearing about all day so I hope that this whole day and the exhibitors have all been helpful to you please feel free to follow up with any of them or with us at EESI and thank you all very much for being here and at the end of the day and thank you to our presenters