The Advanced Bioeconomy: State of the Industry 2019

#25. What will accelerate change? We see 4 breakthroughs, and you’ll note that these are more about deployment than R&D – new technologies and process improvement is an everyday phenomenon that will support broader deployment, but its no longer the case that expansion will not happen without breakthroughs. What we need are more standardized feedstock specs so that we can supply petro-scale biorefineries where they are most convenient to build — shipping pre-processed feedstock will be a must for achieving petro-scale, and petro-scale will help reach petro-cost. We need to see those carbon standards continuing to push innovation without specifying where that innovation has to come from. And, we need new investment vehicles to broaden the investment pool beyond those who can bear the risk and have financial aspirations to those who have smaller portfolios but wish to support a socially-advantaged technology set. It’s all very well to have everyone pull out of non-sustainable investments, but we need to provide the ordinary investor with alternatives.