Finland’s Bioeconomy Strategy: The Fab Finns Set Their Course

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Finland’s new bioeconomy strategy is out — and you can read the 55 pager here. When a country sets a strategy and puts the bioeconomy at a central place in the national plans, that’s a laudable thing, so let’s be fulsome in our praise.

Having made our praises, it is pretty straightforward to understand what a Finland bioeconomy strategy should be and must be, because everything in the bioeconomy begins with the feedstock. The very first question: what do you have that is sustainable, in abundance? The second question: what technologies are available that convert this to something useful and valuable?

So, Finland is in the late stage R&D business of getting the feedstock costs down or the processing yields up. Or, getting to economies of scale that obliterate the problem. Or, putting together a carbon regime that gives the sustainable product an edge in the marketplace that it did not have. And that pretty much sums it up. Oh, we can complicate all this into a 40-pager, assigning roles to a cross-cutting army of stakeholders, forming consortia, supporting R&D, and so forth. But the bioeconomy is not built of meetings, it is built of molecules.

Good news for Finland, water and wood are relevant at a macroeconomic level. Finland’s economy could be somewhere around 25 percent based in the bioeconomy if they worked at it, more or less. Takes some doing in shifting the power mix, the market share owned by various fuel sources, and perhaps a shift in plastics.

Those are big tasks, and part of a bioeconomy strategy is honing a broad plate of opportunity into a couple of lines of sustained action. Making renewable power with wind, some rooftop solar and biogas, splitting water to make hydrogen, converting trees (and especially forest residue) to plastics and fuels. That’s a tall order, gives Finland plenty to do.

Thankfully they have a sustainable spirit, a sense of sharing the burden that is perhaps spurred by the cooperative attitudes that allow people to survive at high latitudes, and some great companies already in place, around which to build an export business and maximize domestic use. Companies like Neste (fuels), MetGen (catalysts), and UPM (forest resources). Meanwhile, about a tenth of the surface area of Finland is represented by lakes, and FIWA is a great co-operative of the water (and wastewater) industries.