At the same time Florida was hosting the third Cellulosic Ethanol Summit in Coral Gables this week, U.S. Sugar announced an agreement with Coskata to explore building a 100 million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol facility in Clewiston, Florida. The facility would be the world’s largest second generation ethanol facility, converting left-over sugar cane material into ethanol.

That is great news for the relatively young Florida Biofuels Association, which helped to host the summit in south Florida.

“We launched in May of 2007 so we are a pretty new organization,” said FBA Executive Director Dana Weber. “We’re focused primarily on a sustainable, clean and safe biofuels sector here in Florida.”

Weber says Florida has an extremely positive environment for biofuels growth. “We’ve got a very aggressive governor who has put some pretty strong policies in place with regards to climate change and alternative energy.”

You can listen to an interview with Dana Weber here:
[audio:http://www.zimmcomm.biz/rfa/cell-summit-08-weber.mp3]
See photos from the Cellulosic Ethanol Summit here.