The Digest’s 10 Top Advanced Bioeconomy Markets & Predictions for 2020

1. The Big Heavy (heavy transport)— Jet, heavy truck, marine, Part II

It was our #1 Prediction in 2019, the shift in focus to The Big Heavy – Jet, heavy truck, marine. And results in 2019 justified our faith, as projects sprang up all over, and new business models emerged in jet.

The Big Heavy is back because 2019 was just a curtain raiser. While we have seen quite a bit of deployment in road transport, we’re going to see a monumental increase in deal flow for Jet over the next year. Airlines are going to finally come in with bankable, long-term offtake contracts. That’s been the hold up in jet — a lack of feedstock and bankable offtake deals (though there have been plenty of non-bankable deal offers going around).

Moreover, this is going to be a big year for the first big marine deals — the arrival of low-sulphur marine fuels is going to create more demand and a better price platform for renewable marines fuels. Marine may be a few years behind aviation, but it’s a big market and is beginning to wake up in a big way.

So as we put it last year:

Saddle up pilgrims for the Big Heavy. Those who have signed the Paris Agreement will quickly add up all the carbon savings available — and the switching costs — in light duty and stationery energy systems (switching from coal to methane, for example), and sooner or later are going to have to come up with a viable, robust heavy transport switching program. There, technologies like renewable diesel and kerosene are the star technologies, and their time has come.