The Digest’s Top 10 Advanced Bioeconomy Markets and Predictions for 2021

Last Year’s Predictions

From last year’s predictions, we scored a pretty respectable 8.5 out of 10, and we’ll grouse a little at the pandemic for costing us some marks.

We gave ourselves a full mark for predicting the focus on heavy transport for biofuels as opposed to light-duty vehicles, and for predicting that there would be a shocking disconnect between oil and renewable fuels prices in 2020. We also earned a full mark for projecting the surge of interest in power-to-x (using excess renewable power to generate fuels & chemicals such as hydrogen), and for a shift from just making to plant burger to differentiation between “plant burgers” and “better burgers”. We got a full mark for predicting that the emphasis on recycling plastics would soar this year, for predicting that the EU would go all-out on advanced fuels this year and leave 1G behind more or less, and we just got a full mark at the 11th hour for predicting expansion of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, Canada bailing us out in late December.

We’ll give ourselves a half-mark on predicting the emergence of a carbon removal industry — there’s been a lot of talk, but less company formation and funding that we thought. And we’ll take a half-mark only for a Crop tech breakthrough — yes, Pivot Bio is going big, but we sort of said “big, big, big” and the pandemic slowed that one down a bit, though we don’t think it changes the vectors, just the velocity of change. And we’ll take a half-mark only for predicting a surge in the tools for biological engineers — companies like Twist have seen their valuations climb to the stratosphere but we’ve seen less toolkit company formation that we expected.