The second Renewable Energy 2008 International Conference [RE2008], held in Busan, Korea on October 13–18, addressed these issues through regular meetings and exhibitions, bringing together representatives from every field of business, industry, academia, government, and civil society comprising of all those involved in the supply, distribution, consumption, development of energy sources. The slot of areas for presentation and discussion is composed of 12 sessions, such as policy, photovoltaics, solar thermal, low energy architecture, wind, biomass, hydrogen and fuel cell, ocean energy, geothermal, advanced power system, heat utilization and energy efficiency, small hydro and non-conventional energies. Among these various renewable energies, biomass has very unique characteristics of only carbon-based renewable energy.

In the biomass session of the conference, many interesting papers (more than 60) from various countries including Austria, China, Greece, Japan and Korea were presented. The presented topics covered most of the biomass conversion technologies from biological conversion to thermochemical conversion which yield major bioenergy products including biofuels for automobiles, biogas, hydrogen and bio-oil.

The full papers presented in the sessions were peer-reviewed via the regular editorial procedures of Bioresource Technology. Finally, 25 papers covering diversified areas of bioenergy research were accepted for publication in this special issue.

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