Unleashing the Power of the Bio-Economy
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Recommendations from the Milken Institute — and a group of industry heavyweights — to accelerate the bioeconomy revolution.
In California this week, the Milken Institute released a good read on the future of the bioeconomy, based on a Financial Innovations Lab workshop from last spring that brought together some of the hottest thinkers in the space — including Digest columnists Mike McAdams and Doug Faulkner and several panelists from next month’s ABLC 2013, including Corinne Young, Wilson Sonsini’s Chris Groobey, and the USDA’s Harry Baumes.
As the Milken Institute observed, “96 percent of all US manufactured goods use some sort of chemical product, and businesses dependent on the chemical industry account for nearly $3.6 trillion in US GDP… Lab participants agreed that the US could replace about 20 percent of petrochemical consumption with bio-based products over the next decade.”
The goal of the workshop, however, was no the usual rah-rah but to identify barriers and make recommendations of how to get around them.
As the Report details, there are “formidable financial barriers: long gestation periods for new products, intimidating competition from petrochemical producers, and daunting capital requirements to bridge the gap between laboratory-level proof-of-concept and commercial production.”
So, here are the recommendations:
Recommendation 1: have concrete and consistent Government policies …
Recommendation 2: Create green banks …
Recommendation 3: Expand public and private “market pull” programs …
Recommendation 4: Level the regulatory playing field …
Recommendation 5: coordinate agricultural and Rural Development programs to enhance industry and social infrastructure …
Recommendation 6: take advantage of existing infrastructure …READ MORE Download report
