Recently I had the always pleasurable experience of recording an hour of bioeconomy banter with one of Australia’s finest, the tech transfer guru Cameron Begley. In that podcast, which you can access here, I had a chance to share with him a formula for success in the bioeconomy.
Eberything begins with feedstock, and the formula is: Sustainable, Affordable, Reliable, Available, Low-Cost and Efficiently Extracted.
That’s S.A.R.A.L.E.E, and Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee, as the old slogan put it.
There are so many nuances to the bioeconomy — processing technology, finance, policy, catalysts, formulations and so forth — focus is key to success of bioeconomy. Otherwise, it is easy to come down with a case of Attention Deficit Disorder, without focus, there’s so much complexity, so many things that must be made right.
To paraphrase former US Vice President Thomas Marshall, what the world needs is a good ten cent carbonstock, that’s to say, ten cents a pound.
Given that most biomass feedstocks are roughly half carbon and hydrogen, that equates to about twenty cents a pound for the Cs and the Hs. If you arrived at around 60 dollars for the same amount of hydrocarbon material in a barrel of oil, you’re punching the same keys on your calculator as me.
Why $60 oil? It goes lower from time to time, but but oil’s political economics get decidedly dicey when the price travels that low, for very long. $60 oil you can bank on as a long-term benchmark to beat.
Capex or opex?
At this stage, it’s time for someone to whisper from stage right, “Capex, baby.” Many feel that way, it’s the capex andf thereby the financing that slows the bioeconomy. Billion dollar bills for construction are, no doubt about it, eye watering.
In years of observing the bioeconomy, the slowing factor that I have seen is policy. Ask anyone smarting from a years-long pathway approval effort or dumbfounded by unambitious mandates or winner-picking regulations.
More or less, policy is focused on subsidizing feedstock costs or mandating feedstock sources. As one example, policymakers have, in the search for a petroleum alternative, focused on a means to deploy gallons made from plant oils costing north of fifty cents a pound. Which, in the end, is a hopeless quest — the politics are unsustainable when the feedstock costs more than $4 a gallon.
The policy pickle
Success stories go the other way, Wind and solar. Oil & gas, policy focuses on subsidizing capex, or making it possible to use the same old assets to make the same old unsustainable molecules.
If energy dominance came from subsidizing expensive feedstocks, we’d all be swimming in SAF and renewable diesel plants would be built every day.
The winning formula is pretty well understood. You can call it wind and solar, that’s how those industries work and why they work. Cheap feedstock and guaranteed recovery of the capex through regulated fees.
The feedstock fix
So, back to those dime feedstocks. It’s one of the reasons I have always admired corn and sugarbeets, to use two examples, there are others, such as cane. Squarely in the right price range, grown effectively around the world by growers with experience and an established supply-chain.
Others to like? Forest residues and wood in general. Animal residues where they are as yet not aggregated — think China’s untapped ocean of UCO, for instance. Crop residues if gasified.
And, we don’t need biology to completely replace petroleum, that’s a straw-man argument made by men with straw for brains. Single platforms do not solve the world’s energy problems in the long-term. That’s how we got oil & gas in the first place.
Goalposts move. Problems change. Back when, our problems were addressed by cheap and dense energy. That’s why coal replaced sail, oil replaced coal. Oil-based personal automobiles relaced electrified mass transit back in the 1920s in Los Angeles, now that you mention it.
The strength of any living system lies in its Diversity, Adaptability, and Resilience. That’s what biology teaches us. That’s a DAR more powerful than the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Summing It Up
So, a simple idea. Build a manufacturing base that produces the carbons we need from the abundant, affordable renewable carbons we have. The problem of developing effective, efficient conversion technologies and intermediates is still there, but other problems melt away — finance, policy and feedstock all fall into place.
As a maximum, think 10 billion tons per year of feedstock not otherwise in use, more or less. So, no more than 5 billion tons more or less of Cs and Hs to work with, it’s not what we will need in the long term, but it’s a lot.It’s that’s roughly the weight of Cs and Hs produced each year by lifting oil.
Why Not?
Why not build one plant this way and see if it works? What if it did? Is that not worth a calculated risk, looking towards the long-term and in the broader context? One plant built on the basis of a guaranteed recovery of the capex and cheap feedstock. You may find that, as it was with solar, it’s a good formula for rapid growth.