May Day: BIO-TIC launches three bio-Roadmaps to tackle innovation hurdles in Europe

As Walpurgisnacht gives way to May Day — ideas to promote acceleration of industrial biotechnology arrive to grace the annual celebration of the spring growing season.

Today is May Day (or, International Workers’ Day, if you prefer) — and the spring festivals celebrating the return of the warm growing season will be underway in many countries. Here come the May Queens and maypole dances, and the choristers of Oxford’s Magdalen College singing madrigals to entertain those who have feasted the night away with their effervescent loyalty to, er, fermentation products.

In Germany, they will be tidying up today from Walpurgisnacht — the time for the mythical meeting of the witches in the Harz Mountains. And similar ceremonies will take place under different names in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and elsewhere — where the burning of the candles and torches looks so much like the gas flares off the Bakken shale field. Throughout South America there are Labor Day festivities.

It’s one day of the year when just about everyone celebrates the rampant combustion of biomass — and, in the morning, renew their ties with land and farm and labor.

Three draft roadmaps for the Europe

So it altogether fitting that, in Brussels, the BIO-TIC project has just published three draft roadmaps on how to tackle the innovation hurdles that hamper the growth of industrial biotechnology in Europe, and the group is seeking comments and contributions from stakeholders, which are due by the end of August 2014 to [email protected].

“We believe it is crucial to make [the draft roadmaps] available to the IB community,” said Claire Gray, BIO-TIC project co-ordinator, EuropaBio, “in order to test the suggested recommendations, as well as to collect new innovative ideas for enabling Europe to capture the full potential of this transformative technology. These roadmaps bring a good overview of the challenges [and] propose solutions towards making Europe the world’s leading region for industrial biotech by 2030”.

The market roadmap gives an overview of the current markets for a selection of five IB business cases for Europe and market projections extending to 2030. In order to identify potential product segments and overcome market barriers, “it is important that the voice of the bio-based industry is heard,” says Anna Saarentaus from Pöyry and leader of the market roadmap.

The technological roadmap aims to gain insight into the R&D-related hurdles that are impeding the full realization of Europe’s IB market potential in 2030. In addition, the roadmap seeks to set priorities in terms of R&D and other actions to overcome the R&D hurdles. “Bioconversion and feedstock supply are the areas where most efforts in terms of R&D should be taken,” argues Elsbeth Roelofs from TNO and leader of the technological roadmap.

Dirk Carrez, leader of the non-technological roadmap, Clever Consult, says: “Innovation will only be stimulated if a correct regulatory and policy framework is in place. This is why the identification of regulatory and non-technological hurdles that may inhibit innovation are an important part of the BIO-TIC project”.

Technology hurdles and proposed solutions

• Process performance is currently poor: need to increase yield, productivity and robustness Lab scale results with enzyme systems are very difficult to scale up due to the interaction of these systems;
• The costs for downstream processing can be very high in IB, since biocatalytic systems produce many impurities;
• The uncertainty of feedstock availability;
• The current raw material for IB competes with the food chain.

Market hurdles

• Process performance is currently poor: need to increase yield, productivity and robustness Lab scale results with enzyme systems are very difficult to scale up due to the interaction of these systems;
• The costs for downstream processing can be very high in IB, since biocatalytic systems produce many impurities;
• The uncertainty of feedstock availability;
• The current raw material for IB competes with the food chain.

Looking at the challenges in depth: aviation biofuels

Let’s look at an industry segment, aviation, where it is widely agreed that there is an opportunity for carbon reduction and biofuels offer the best solution.

The stakeholders identified 12 key market barriers.

Short term hurdles

• Production costs
• Cost, availability, quality and sustainability of feedstock
• Customer base limited due to high price
• Lack of incentives / legislation pushing aviation biofuels
• EU policies provide support in a very fragmented manner and the incentives are reversed: high-grade feedstock is converted into low-grade products
• R&D funding
• Heavy EU regulations and certifications, especially regarding feedstocks
• Lack of IB knowledge

Medium term

• Lack of financing / High capital investments
• Lack of long-term policy stability
• Acceptance of GM

Long term

• Limited plant capacity

The stakeholders offered 7 potential solutions

1. More economical conversion processes, with higher yield, less wastage / Identification of the essential active enzymes within a mix in order to improve the ratio of active to inactive (current enzyme strains only contain a small amount of active enzyme). By improving enzyme mixes, the process will be more efficient and economically viable / Development of logistics for agricultural feedstocks in order to get biomass to processing plants / Increasing the density of agricultural feedstocks on the field / Research organisations need to focus their research on new feedstocks and new processes / Wider feedstock base would improve feedstock availability and price flexibility (technological breakthroughs are needed) / Supply chain certification against the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) EU RED standard

2) Liberalisation of feedstock markets / Sustainability and availability of feedstock utilisation will require international cooperation

3) Lower production costs, lower feedstock cost

4) Government subsidies / A fuel tax for kerosene

5) The EU should create concrete policies to support aviation biofuels, e.g. subsidies / Aviation biofuels could be included in the road transportation biofuel mandates / Creation of synergies between mandates and classifications of biofuels / Global actions / Promotion of public support and aggregated demand e.g. Corporate Biofuel Program, where companies can choose to fly on sustainable biofuel

6) Simplified procedures

7) Government support for scaling up and deployment

The Digest’s Take

The hurdles are not new — these could have been written five years ago. They could have been grouped into three:

1. The technology is not yet sustainable.
2. Government support is weak on several fronts.
3. Investment support is weak.

Meanwhile, the solutions are not novel, and could be grouped into two:

1. Improved technology, especially on feedstock.
2. More government support – R&D funding, subsidies, mandates, scale-up (financing?), fuel tax for fossil fuels.

In the Digest’s view, the solution to such a broad set of challenges is through global co-operation — and, in the EU, specialization. The EU may benefit from a tough dialogue by stakeholders on which of the three areas it wishes to specialize in, now.

Feedstock –> Processing technology –> Market adoption

Which of these three has the highest priority for you?

• Sustainable aviation biofuels as soon as possible, with feedstock and technology sourced where they can be obtained the most economically.
• Robust technology licensing by EU developers, producing biofuels in the EU where feasible, but offered around the world where more advantaged feedstocks exist.
• Sustainable feedstock developed in the EU for a variety of sectors that need it (aviation, road transport, chemicals, plastics, etc), using technologies developed in the EU if possible but from elsewhere if more advantaged. Leading to market adoption in the EU where policies exist to accelerate adoption, but potentially exported to whatever market has those market accelerators in place.

Why make hard choices now?

In general, the barriers create a sort of self-reinforcing development gridlock. Feedstock and technology challenges lead to tepid government and investor support. Which then, in turn, lead to a slowdown in solving feedstock and technology challenges.

What we have seen, globally, is that technology arises when cheap feedstock is available to fill a market opportunity. It’s happening with natural gas now — and happened with petroleum in the past, and coal before that. Government support is typically important (these days) in opening up energy markets controlled by incumbents (e.g. through mandates), but long-term support is generally predicated on sustainable feedstock — meaning environmental, social and economic feasibility.

Ultimately, the dialogue may need to focus first on feedstock in the EU – because of the challenges of growing in cold-weather, the food security issues and the subsidies that have become established over the years.

If the EU wishes, ultimately, to focus on residues (e.g. agricultural, industrial, municipal, animal and forest) and forestry products then that decision might drive technology innovation and market policy. Stating such a policy may well help focus public and media attention in the right way.

Having it all ways — well, it embroils the EU in a tremendous set of controversies (GMO, food vs fuel, land-use and land-use change) that the supporters of industrial biotechnology may not have the horses to handle.

Download the complete roadmap documents here.

(Registration is required, but the downloads are free).

More about BIO-TIC

BIO-TIC was launched in September 2012 with the aim to identify, examine and comprehend innovation hurdles in IB across Europe and formulate action plans to overcome them. After carrying out extensive literatures studies, more than 60 interviews with experts and collecting information through eight regional workshops, three roadmaps focusing on the market potential, Research & Development (R&D) priorities and non-technological hurdles of IB innovation have been developed and made publicly available.