by Kevin R. Collins, President and CEO

Those with short term outlooks find it easy to stand on the sidelines and watch us do something that’s difficult but important; that is, pioneer a new large-scale energy technology that will offer near term solutions to energy and environmental needs in the U.S. and abroad. Then, when it doesn’t go perfect, or even quite as we had planned, they complain or make a short term gain from the challenges we’re striving to address.

That’s not what Evergreen is all about, and that’s why we announced late last week our decision to end the practice of quarterly conference calls. We explained our thinking in a letter to shareholders. The cynics will probably make some hay of it, but the fact is we’re not hiding – far from it. I’m as accessible as ever. We’re simply adjusting our communication methods to better fit the stage where the company is at.

Our announcement today, for example, shows we’re continuing to prepare for the construction of future K-Fuel® plants.  We’ve appointed a VP of business development for the U.S., Mike Rosenberg, and promoted Scott Terhune to the position of VP for International business development. 

These are more than glorified sales guys.  Mike and Scott each have MBAs and they will get deep--in fact--already are deep into development deals we’ve either already announced (Indonesia) or that are in the pipeline.

To support their efforts and other detailed work related to plant construction, we’ve beefed up our engineering team. We started late last summer with the hiring of former power company president and nuclear sub captain Steve Wolff as our executive vice president of engineering and Dr. John Winter, who came to us from GE as our VP of engineering. Under Steve, in addition to Dr. Winter we’ve added eight other professionals to our engineering staff in the past six months. They will support our business development efforts by working with Bechtel to apply operational lessons from the Gillette plant to our future projects at home and abroad.