BD Zones and BDO Zones: Weaponizing Biomass to support a Bio-Fueled Economic Recovery

Step 1: Designate BD Zones

The BD Zone Program has a strong and proven precedent used by most states to create efficiencies and drive economic development:  Certified Industrial Site-Readiness Programs.[i] Most states have them because they work. Site Certification is one of the most effective tools state economic development professionals use to create a competitive advantage in successfully locating significant manufacturing operations.  We do not have this kind of tool for the development of bioeconomy projects — but we should.

Site certification programs are carried out with consistent application of standards and critical qualitative factors to ensure ‘development readiness’. Narrowing sites to a short-list based on validated, important criteria significantly reduces development risks and delays to project timelines, and creates cost savings. Developers rely on them as a key input for locating high-impact projects.

In the same way, we need to designate geographic zones across the country that are ideal for bio-project development; areas where feedstock readiness can be certified as “high availability and low risk”. We call these Bioeconomy Development Zones. BD Zones will be certified according to three main criteria:

1. Large surpluses of biomass;[ii]
2. Low-risk supply chains to deliver it;
3. Suitable infrastructure to support bio-plant operation.

The good news is that with over a billion tons of available biomass around the country, there are thousands of potential areas that should meet these criteria.

Certification of BD Zones

Government should set the certification requirements for BD Zones using existing standards that pertain to feedstock risk and quickly set up a task force to approve nominations as ‘certified BD Zones’. The standards used to rate and certify the low risk of feedstock supply in BD Zones should have quantitative criteria developed by government and industry, and accepted by stakeholders in both the bioenergy sectors and the capital markets.[iii]

We have the right tools for the job. The Framework for Biomass Supply Chain Risk (BSCR) Standards is a standardized transparent protocol developed over the past 4 years for exactly this purpose by the USDOE’s Idaho National Lab (INL), Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) and Ecostrat,  together with  a stakeholder group of several hundred major bioeconomy investors, plant operators, feedstock and equipment suppliers, government and academia, with funding from the US Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies  Office (BETO).[iv] It enables the quantification and risk rating of over 126 Feedstock Risk Indicators  developed specifically to de-risk investment for the capital markets and can easily be modified to rate high level feedstock risk for BD Zones.

Certification of BD Zones could be carried out by an independent Biomass Rating Agency— an autonomous consortium made up of the developers of the BSCR Standards, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and key capital market players. Certification criteria for BD Zones could be developed by the consortium based on the BSCR Standards and Risk Ratings and distributed to state economic development organizations who would, in turn, be tasked with quickly soliciting nominations for qualifying BD Zones from local associations, communities and businesses.