1968: Are we back there again? Can the bioeconomy help?

Some days, it feels like 1968 all over again.

Crisis in the Middle East, a Robert F. Kennedy running for president, assassins in the news, political upheaval in France. Russian tanks rolling in Eastern Europe. An American president eligible for re-election deciding belatedly and under pressure not to run, a VP running after not being heard of lately, a big GOP lead in the late July polls. Deep political divides between young and old, black and white, a debate over diversity and women’s rights. Far-reaching rulings out of the Supreme Court.  Excepting the Apollo moon shot (then) and a swarm of mobile devices (now), the similarities outweigh the differences.

So, if history is any guide, fasten your seat belts, we’re in for a bumpy season.

Restoring optimism

So, what can we do to restore our sense of optimism? For one, we can celebrate the other great change in our world, the advent of the advanced bioeconomy. I swear, go to biopreferred.org, select out a USDA-certified, BioPreferred product you’d like to support, make a purchase and you’ll feel a whole lot better. It may feel like a drop in the bucket, but as you’ll observe from any rain storm, many drops make the water.

A bigger and more worthy task, equal in impact to the Apollo moon shot, is to de-risk industrial biotechnology investments and de-carbonize agriculture. Those are not drops in the ocean, they are, each, a pipeline of clear spring water for a thirsty population.

How might we do the one, or do the other? How might we climb out of 2024 better and faster than we moved on from 1968?You might well recall the global financial and social recovery, back then. Peace and economic revival was arriving in South East Asia. There was detente with the Soviets, an opening to China, there was the end of the  suffocating gold standard, there was less tension on the streets. What derailed it? The 1973 oil crisis and the surge in oil prices in the 1970s.

So, we have real reasons to think about de-risking our economy by de-risking the bioeconomy. More options, less risk. Two basic principles seem to apply, and involve a shift in our paradigm.

The current paradigm

1. Optimize the use of current infrastructure for existing products.
2. Deploy new infrastructure to support new products.

That’s what we do with oil refineries, make them run better.

Also, that’s we’re doing with the business of electric power, optimizing old plants (e./g. swapping coal for gas) and building new capacity (e.g. wind and solar). Optimize the old, build the new, repeat, repeat, regret. I think we’re headed for a lot of trouble with that paradigm — anyone who’s had a chance with the Texas hurricane to reconsider grid stability might also be thinking that we are taking real risks with the way we are expanding electric demand and supply, willy-nilly.

A new paradigm

For your consideration.

1. Repurpose current infrastructure to support new products, first-of-kinds and so forth.
2. Build new capacity only for proven processes.

Using existing refineries and infrastructure to support new molecules, that’s classic de-risking by reducing capex, repurposing skilled labor, shortening the permitting cycles, limiting construction timelines and so forth. De-risked molecules cost less and deploy faster, that’s one reason renewable diesel has expanded so quickly. 

Building new capacity for proven processes — that’s to some extent what wind and solar are doing (locally, not at a grid level), and it’s what has made biogas via anaerobic digestion such a fast mover, and makes hydrogen easier to deploy quickly (e.g. proven electroayzers).

Decarbonize agriculture

Feedstock costs have to come down if biology is to compete with fossil in the long-term without exotic carbon prices. And $300 per ton of carbon is fine for a couple of demonstration-scale projects — but, economy-wide it would be highly disruptive, even unsustainable. And sustainability is the point of, er, sustainability.

There are two ways for feedstock costs to come down.

The first is to provide less income to farmers, or to the players in  the broader agricultural value chain. Common sense advises us to avoid the former, lobbyists will advise us to avoid the latter.

The second is to decarbonize agriculture so that lower carbon prices have more impact. There has been an avalanche of discussion lately on soil carbon sequestration because people are starting to realize that you simply cannot solve the Ag problem without a form of carbon sequestration, and you cannot criss cross the country with pipelines to move CO2 from 500 different refining sites to a handful of cave formations in the Midwest that can hold the gas.

I’ve heard of two basic ideas, on decarbonizing agriculture.

One is to pyrolyze biomass to produce some value in gas and liquids and then to store the biochar as a stable and local form of sequestration that may also have soil benefit. The other idea I have heard is to use the reverse water gas shift to make, say, methane from CO2 and hydrogen, hydrogen obtained from splitting water at the refinery (a place which has existing water delivery infrastructure). There are other ways to use the RWGS — methanol might be a target, or carbon monoxide. Our best science minds will advise us as to whether either of these two are good ideas, or if others should supplant them. 

Make Thought, Not War

And, there may be more than these two basic ideas to capture carbon from fermentation and from biorefinery energy production (e.g. when we combusting natural gas to generate heart and power to run biorefineries). So, let us look into the best means, by all means, and soon. We need several viable alternatives to oil & gas, the more the better, the sooner the better — for, putting all our eggs in one basket to solve a problem of today simply creates another problem tomorrow, as we found when we shifted from coal and electricity to oil in the first place.  Yes, we shifted from electricity to oil, did you know that? Go look at the century-old public transit infrastructure of Los Angeles you can see bits of it here and there. Again, more options, less risk.

1968 was not a vintage year fro the world, but it was not 1938, and we recovered, if all too slowly, and in unsustainable ways. So, 1968 Redux? Perhaps. But 1968 Aftermath? We are not condemned to the same future, if we choose a better path, and now.