The line up together with the uncertainty context is poised to make this year’s edition of Argus Biomass Conference one of the most exciting yet. Not that any of the previous editions have been boring or dull. Exciting may not seem to be the most appropriate word but was the first that comes to mind while waiting to board the late evening flight from Stockholm to London.
At face value, pun intended, the programme lineup has a lot of familiar names. However, to draw a parallel to the intelligence community, the type of intell community or its purpose is not important, what is important are the various combinations of “knowns” and “unknowns” at play.
“Known knowns” are of course the things you know that you know, like what you had for breakfast, Swedish pellet statistics for 2016 or FIT rates in Japan.
A more important category, “known unknowns”, the things you know that you don’t know is, apart from the social aspect, one main reason for attending an event like Argus.
And that is why this year’s Argus is exciting, there are simply a lot of known unknowns; Graanul Invest and Langerlo, Drax and Louisiana Pellets, near term pellet demand in South Korea and Japan, China’s pellet import ban, black pellet plant project status updates from CEG and Arbaflame to mention a very few and the people who can potentially shed some light on those unknowns are there.
Whether or not people do is another matter entirely and remains to be seen but certainly, if the pre-conference focus day with its three parallel tracks and main conference programme is anything to go by this year could be a Landmark edition of Argus Biomass.
