Prince George, B.C.- The  Bioenergy conference is celebrating it's 10th anniversary  and  started today with a special  award.

The  Founders' Award  in Bioenergy Excellence has been presented to  three men who were in on the ground floor of bioenergy a decade ago.

John Swaan, Don Zurowski and Michael Kerr are the recipients of the first ever Founders’ Award in Bioenergy Excellence.  

“I’m happy to announce the establishment of the Founders’ Award in Bioenergy Excellence, and I’m even happier to announce that the first recipients of this award are the actual founders of this conference,” said Rob van Adrichem, member of the International Bioenergy Society’s Board of Directors. “These three gentlemen were instrumental not only in establishing the conference, but driving the development of the Northern BC bioeconomy forward over the last two decades.”

Swaan, an early pioneer of the wood pellet industry, brought the idea of establishing a bioenergy conference in Prince George back from a similar conference in Stockholm, Sweden in 2002. The purpose was to start to develop awareness of the industry in North America, and to build relationships and share information between Canada and the European Union.

Zurowski, then a Prince George City Councillor and head of the Community Futures Development Corporation of Fraser-Fort George, had worked with Swaan on his early business ventures in the pellet industry. Kerr, then an industrial technology advisor with the National Research Council, had also been instrumental in developing early bioenergy ventures in response to the need to eliminate beehive burners from the forest industry.

With the help of a few other key individuals and seed funding from the Forest Expo Society, the three started pulling together the first program for a bioenergy conference. And in June 2004, about 120 people from Canada and Europe gathered at the University of Northern BC for a day and a half of presentations, exhibits and networking.

“I think we had about eight exhibitors that first year, so you can see how far we’ve come,” laughed van Adrichem, who notes this year’s conference has almost 60 exhibitors, over 300 delegates and 43 speakers from around the world.

The award will be presented every two years to a leader in advancing the bioenergy industry in Canada and globally.