Paul Zorner is president and chief executive officer of Hawai'i BioEnergy, a coalition formed in 2006 by three of Hawai'i's largest landowners to identify and develop new sources of renewable energy for the Islands.

Q. How will the country's financial crisis affect Hawai'i BioEnergy's operations?

A. It's going to be a challenge, but I don't think it's an impossible challenge. Credit markets are tight, but as a country and as a world, people recognize that the era of cheap oil is over. We have to do something about the environment that continues to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and renewable energy counters both of those things. We send $10 million a day out of Hawai'i to bring oil into the economy. If we could make a good portion of our own energy and maintain some portion of that $10 million, it's going to do great things for this state. When you go to people who have cash, they will see that.

Q. What are the obstacles or challenges that face Hawai'i BioEnergy?

A. The biggest obstacle is trying to make a viable company work in an area where you are limited by the Islands themselves, the amount of land that's available and land that is very expensive. That makes it very hard to understand how to make an economically viable business. But I'm a very big believer that there's a tremendous amount of technology that's been developed over the last 25 years, and if we combine these things in the right way, we can remarkably increase the productivity per unit of land per unit of water, which are both restricted resources here in the Islands.

Q. What was the impetus behind Hawai'i BioEnergy?

A. Hawai'i BioEnergy is a coalition to support the economic, environmental and community integrity of Hawai'i. Our objective is to work in concert with others to improve energy security and to jump-start what I call a green economy. It's made up of three landowners: Maui Land & Pineapple Co., Grove Farm and Kamehameha Schools, which joined with significant California-based venture firms with a strong base of technology and asset management. Together, the venture has about 430,000 acres of land under management and a total of $15 billion invested in a whole variety of vehicles in the economy.

Q. The venture started two years ago. What's the status of the project?

A. What we've been doing is trying to make sure we plan well. Good execution is absolutely dependent upon great planning. We've been trying to think through what technology is available on a global basis, what the true needs are, what you can do to increase agricultural productivity and tie that to increases in productivity of agricultural processing methods and bring global best practices. We've finally gotten to the point where we think there is a means to our end of energy security here and so the partners have seen fit to bring on two people as permanent employees — Joel Matsunaga, who's a former Hawaiian Telcom executive, who is the executive vice president of Hawai'i BioEnergy, and then myself.

Q. What kind of work is being done?

A. We're taking a look at several projects, and they're largely sugar cane-based and algae-based. Algae is a really interesting "crop." It could be a new crop for Hawai'i. In an algae organism, about 75 percent of its body weight is stacked with oil, and you can extract that oil and convert it into a variety of high density fuels, such as jet fuel or biodiesel. But you need to feed it with carbon dioxide, so the other foundation we have as a company is sugar cane. Obviously we produced sugar cane for a long time, but it's an industry that has largely died out. We are intent to revitalize that in order to focus on producing renewable energy from that biomass. You can use the fiber that's left over to produce power, and obviously the island needs copious quantities of both of them. When processing that, you produce about 15 tons of carbon dioxide per acre. When you finally get done making ethanol and power, that CO2 just drifts off into the atmosphere. But you can capture it and feed it to the algae and you can make not only the oil that I talked about, but there's an awful lot of high-quality protein that's produced as well that could be used for animal feed. In essence, we're looking at an integrated biorefinery that has a diverse product portfolio.

Q. What's the timetable on these projects?

A. I would hope that we'd be able to identify and begin projects on a small scale within the next year and any major capital construction would begin within a couple of years. It's an interesting business. You've got to make these plans. You've got to find capital financing and begin to hire the employees and do a whole variety of things. I'll be disappointed if we don't begin to operate within those time lines.

Q. What was the last project you worked on before you came to Hawai'i?

A. I and a partner worked to establish a cane-to-energy operation in Mozambique, and they're just constructing it now. We put our plans in place, began planting cane, and we hired an on-the-ground management team to do what needs to be done. I'm a big believer that if it's going to impact Africa in a meaningful way, it has to be done by Africans. I wanted to come back home and do the same thing here.

Q. Are you confident it will work here?

A. I'm a farm boy from Oregon. I love agriculture, and I truly believe that renewable energy is going to be based upon agriculture. It's a way of retaining money in local communities and it's a way of re-invigorating the rural farming community. The basis of many great societies is the rural farming community.

Q. How did you go from a "farm boy" to the bioenergy industry?

A. I've always been involved in some sort of agriculture. I'm a weed scientist by training. That's vegetation management control. I took a job with Mycogen Corp., which is an agricultural biotechnology company, learned a lot about production agriculture and fermentation. That led to another job at Dow Chemical. I was chief scientist for Dow's global biotechnology platform. Dow was very concerned about what they were going to do once oil dried out, and they were looking at agriculture. And I started five or six startups, so it all bundled together. The world's situation is you kind of wake up one day and say, "Gee, we really do need an alternative source of energy and agriculture can make a big contribution here. It not only can provide energy, it can provide food as well." If you integrate these things right, it's not a choice of food vs. fuel. You can do food plus fuel.

Q. How would you determine success?

A. When I commission the first ethanol refinery.

Q. You also are involved in education?

A. I've been very involved in educational initiatives, and one thing that I personally want to be involved in, and what the company wants to involve ourselves in, is trying to encourage the youth of Hawai'i to consider careers on the island, especially STEM-based education: science, technology, engineering and math. The U.S. has fallen down in that area, and if we're going to become energy independent as a nation and as a state, and have a green economy, then we're going to have to prepare a workforce that can work on that new green economy. All of us working in the industry are going to have to reach out to the local schools and educators, and support them and get the kids excited about having jobs in a field like this.