2012 Energy Directors Conference

As CoBank’s president and chief executive officer, Bob Engel is responsible for implementing the bank’s strategic and business direction as set by the Board of Directors. Previously, he served as CoBank’s president and chief operating officer for six years. Mr. Engel is a member of CoBank’s Senior Leadership Team and the Management Executive Committee.

Prior to joining CoBank in 2000, Mr. Engel was chief banking officer at HSBC Bank USA in New York. He has 24 years of banking experience, primarily with HSBC Bank USA, and eight years of accounting experience, including an agribusiness specialization, with the firms of KPMG and Deloitte & Touche. During his 14-year tenure at HSBC, he served in a variety of management and credit positions, including chief credit officer, before being named chief banking officer.

Mr. Engel earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Niagara University in Niagara Falls, New York, where he was designated Magna Cum Laude and later received an honorary doctorate. He is a member of the board of directors for the Federal Farm Credit Banks Funding Corporation (Vice Chairman) and Farm Credit Leasing (Chairman). Mr. Engel is also a member of the Farm Credit System Presidents Planning Committee (Chairman). In addition, he serves on the board of trustees for Regis University, the board of directors of New Ventures in Higher Education, Inc., the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership, Mile High United Way, Buffalo Sabres Alumni Association and as trustee emeritus at Niagara University. He also serves on the Executive Council of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. He is a recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Mahdi Abu-Omar is the associate director for the Center for Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio) at Purdue University and a professor of chemistry.  The author of more than 90 original research papers published in scientific journals, Mr. Abu-Omar’s research is aimed at developing catalysts for renewable energy and environmental applications.

Mr. Abu Omar also consults regularly with business and legal leaders. He has delivered more than 100 invited lectures and seminars describing his research findings, acts as reviewer for numerous journals and funding agencies and has organized several symposia on catalysis and energy.

Mr. Abu-Omar is the recipient of several awards including the College of Engineering Team Excellence Award from Purdue University, a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, a Beckman Young Investigator Award from the Beckman Foundation, and a Young Investigator Award from the Society of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines. In 2008, Purdue University named Mr. Abu-Omar University Faculty Scholar.

Howard Behar is the former president of Starbucks North America and Starbucks International. He joined Starbucks in 1989 as vice president of sales and operations, and grew the retail business from 28 stores to more than 400. He was named president of Starbucks Coffee International in 1995.

Under Mr. Behar’s leadership, Starbucks opened its first location in Tokyo in 1996, and then introduced the Starbucks brand across Asia and the United Kingdom. He retired as president of Starbucks North America in January 2003, but continues to serve as an advisor to the company. Mr. Behar also served on the Starbucks board of directors from 1996 to 2008. He is the author of It's Not About the Coffee, a book about his leadership principles.

Mr. Behar serves on several boards, including Anna’s Linens, the University of Washington Foundation and the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership. He also sits on the advisory board of Anthos Capital. 

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow in the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment.  He has been writing about the energy business for two decades and his articles have appeared in numerous publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly to The Washington Post.

Bryce’s first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. His most recent release, titled Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, has been praised by The Wall Street Journal which called it “unsentimental, unsparing and impassioned.”

An experienced and engaging public speaker, Bryce has spoken to dozens of professional, corporate, and civic groups including the Houston World Affairs Council, American Petroleum Institute, National Association of Attorneys General, and the Bruno Leoni Institute in Rome. He has lectured at numerous universities including the University of Tulsa, University of North Carolina, National Defense University, St. Edwards University and the University of Texas. He appears regularly on TV and radio programs ranging from the BBC and CNN to PBS and NPR.

Patrick Buchanan is a conservative columnist, author and political analyst. He has been a senior advisor to three presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. He is also chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative.

Born in Washington, D.C., Mr. Buchanan’s career began at the St. Louis Globe-Dispatch, where he worked as an editorial writer. In 1966, he became the first full-time staffer for then-candidate Richard Nixon. He would go on to serve in the Nixon White House and would later work for President Gerald Ford and serve as President Ronald Reagan’s communications director.

After leaving the Ford White House in 1974, Mr. Buchanan became a syndicated columnist and a founding member of three long-running television talk shows: NBC’s The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s Capital Gang and Crossfire. He is the author of 10 books, including six best-sellers.

Mr. Buchanan received his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1962.

A national correspondent for The Atlantic, James Fallows is one of America's most respected journalists. His work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others. He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report.

Whether writing about politics, national security, the economy or foreign policy, Fallows strives to do one thing: "Make the important interesting."  He is the author of several books, including Breaking the News, about problems with contemporary news media, and Blind into Baghdad, about the lead-up to the war in Iraq, which is now required reading in many military programs. Mr. Fallows is a recipient of the National Book Award, the American Book Award and the National Magazine Award. Based in China since 2006, he is now chronicling that country's explosive growth and its staggering ramifications for America and the world.

Mr. Fallows has been a visiting professor at a number of universities in the United States and China, and holds the Chair in U.S. Media at the United States Studies Centre at University of Sydney. He served as chief speechwriter for Jimmy Carter for two years; the youngest person ever to hold that job.

Kevin A. Hassett is senior fellow and director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He has advised presidents, presidential candidates, members of Congress and federal agencies on issues relating to macroeconomics and tax policy.

Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and he has served as an associate professor of economics and finance at Columbia University. During the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, Mr. Hassett was as a policy consultant to the U.S. Treasury Department. In addition, he has served as an economic adviser to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain.

Toward Fundamental Tax Reform is Mr. Hassett’s most recent book. His scholarly articles have appeared in numerous professional journals, and he also writes a weekly column for Bloomberg. Mr. Hassett has also been published in the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly and Washington Post, and appeared on the Today show, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline and Power Lunch.

Mr. Hassett holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

An internationally recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends, Joel Kotkin is the author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. The book, which explores how the nation will evolve in the next four decades, received rave reviews in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and on National Public Radio.

Described by the New York Times as America’s “uber-geographer,” Mr. Kotkin has been one of the country’s most widely-published journalists over the past three decades. He writes the weekly New Geographer column for Forbes.com and his work regularly appears in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Politico, Foreign Policy and The Daily Beast. He is considered to be an expert on the evolution of cities, towns and rural areas, and writes about their problems, opportunities and futures.

Mr. Kotkin is a distinguished presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California; a contributing editor to the City Journal in New York; a senior visiting fellow at the Civil Service College in Singapore, and a fellow at the National Chamber Foundation. He also serves as executive editor of the website www.newgeography.com.

Mr. Kotkin attended the University of California, Berkeley.

Jo Dee Messina has charted nine Number One singles on the Billboard country music charts, including fan favorites, “Bye Bye,” “I’m Alright,” and “Heads Carolina, Tails California.”  She has been honored by the Country Music Association, the Academy of Country Music and has been nominated for two Grammy Awards.  She was the first female country artist to score three multiple-week Number One songs from the same album.  To date, she has two Platinum and three Gold-certified albums.  Fittingly, Jo Dee was born and raised in the Northeastern U.S. but her spirited and tender performances make her one of America’s country sweethearts.