“Being involved in the EUBCE for many years, it is a great honour to welcome the biomass community for the third time to the Netherlands, after 2002 and 2016. It is at a timely moment where the increasing climate crisis, energy resilience and insecurity ask for concrete innovative solutions and action.

Globally the energy transition is happening with improved efficiencies, more solar and wind, but also more biofuels and bioenergy. However, we do need also a material transition, where our society can move away from fossil resources.

This EUBCE conference will bring together many experts in all these areas and will create opportunities, to learn, to exchange ideas and realise future collaborations. These experts will come from science, industry and government and it is in this triangle that we can move forward jointly, bringing policies to realisation.

Promising policies exist in many areas around the world, and in Europe the EU recently launched the bioeconomy strategy. But now it is time to deliver and take concrete action. Jointly we can show from this conference in the Hague how we can realise this, and take the right action globally and in your own country.“

Kees W. Kwant is a Senior Expert on Bioenergy and Circular Biobased Economy. He was employed at the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), a department of the Ministry of Climate and Green Growth in the Netherlands. He primarily links researchers and industry to help develop the circular biobased economy and bioenergy in the Netherlands and abroad.  He has been active in bilateral collaborations on biobased applications and involved in the IEA Bioenergy Exco and was the chairman between 2014 – 2017. He was a member of the CEM Biofuture Initiative and Mission Director of the Mission Integrated Biorefineries for fuels and chemicals within Mission Innovation till the end of 2025. He is now ready to act as one of the chairman’s of the EUBCE and will continue to work in this area voluntarily and from his own company.

“At a time when the biobased economy is moving from promise to implementation, EUBCE brings the global biomass community together to accelerate real-world impact across energy, materials and chemicals. EUBCE network together can create and support sustainable biomass value chains from feedstock to end use, hereby we strengthen industrial resilience, climate performance and strategic autonomy in a rapidly evolving global context.”

Kirsten Steinbusch (1980) is Program Director of the €338M Dutch National Growth Fund programme Biobased Circular, where she leads a national effort to accelerate biopolymer and biobased materials innovation across the entire value chain—from sustainable feedstocks and conversion technologies to design, recycling, and market deployment. With more than two decades of experience in biotechnology, bioprocess development, and circular value-chain innovation, she works at the intersection of science, industry, and policy to enable large-scale sustainable production systems.

Kirsten previously co-founded and scaled two biotechnology companies, DAB.bio and ChainCraft, advancing fermentation and process-intensification technologies from concept to pilot and demonstration scale. Before entering industry, she spent nearly ten years at Wageningen University conducting and leading research on anaerobic conversions and mixed-culture fermentation.

She is a fellow of the Netherlands Academy of Engineering and serves in advisory and supervisory roles to support the transition toward a circular, biobased, and climate-neutral economy.