No fueling around

Dr. Ghasem Shahbazi, an SAES professor and the director of the Bioengineering Program, has been named to the five-person board of directors for the North Carolina Biofuels Center, an agency recently established with $5 million in funding authorized by the N. C. General Assembly. The Biofuels Center will be located in Oxford, and the board is moving quickly to get a director and a staff on board. Shahbazi’s fellow board members are Dr. Johnny Wynne, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N. C. State; Billy Ray Hall of the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center; and two senior officials with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, W. Steven Burke and Norris Tolson.

The new Biofuels Center is a direct (and prompt) result of an assignment the General Assembly turned over to the North Carolina Biotechnology Center last summer. The General Assembly asked for a comprehensive plan for developing biofuels and speeding them into production. The Biotechnology Center's steering committee turned the project over to five co-conveners for a blueprint for “Fueling North Carolina's Future: North Carolina's Strategic Plan for Biofuels Leadership." The plan is built around "Nine Realistic Strategies" for a biofuels industry that will produce 10 percent of the liquid fuels sold in North Carolina by 2017. The five co-conveners who were the principle architects of the plan — Shahbazi, Wynne, Hall, Burke and Tolson — moved on to become the Biofuels Center’s initial board of directors.

Posted September 19, 2007 04:18 PM

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