In the Seventeenth Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals, leading researchers from academia, industry, and government present state-of-the-art papers on how bioengineering can be used to produce fuels and chemicals competitively. This year's program covered topics in thermal, chemical, and biological processing; applied biological processing; bioprocessing research; process economics and commercialization; and environmental biotechnology. The ideas and techniques described will play an important role in developing new biological processes for producing fuels and chemicals on a large scale, and in reducing pollution, waste disposal problems, and the potential for global climate change.