Algae World Summit 2010: Building Bridges in the Algae Value Chain will be held May 17-19, 2010, Hilton Del Mar, San Diego, California. This event will bring together a variety of algae industry representatives, financiers, and researchers, who will share the latest information on their activities and key technical, financial, and economic issues they are addressing.

As the emerging algae industry continues its march toward commercialization, it faces a number of vital decisions about the right path forward: what markets to serve, what commercialization strategies to follow, what business models to adopt, what scale up approaches to implement, what infrastructure to put in place and what collaborative relationships to establish. The Algae World Summit 2010 will address these and other issues currently dominating the industry’s discussions revolving around commercialization and industry building.

The growing worldwide demand for bio-based chemical products offers algae developers an attractive market-entry point. Economic and scale barriers for chemical feedstock are not as daunting as biofuels and the “high value, low volume” value proposition is more attractive. The summit will discuss what types of opportunities exist for algae in the bio-based chemicals market, what paths are available for entry, what challenges need to be overcome to be successful, and what sorts of relationships chemical companies are looking to forge within the algae community.