Letter from Europe: The Bioeconomy’s Journey to Yes through the Valley of No

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In Europe this past week we’ve had European Commission’s own and massive EU Sustainability Week, the ART Fuels Forum, and the Paris Air Show, and if you were trying to get anywhere quickly along the Paris-Brussels corridor, it was a tough 7 days.

It’s easy to describe the atmosphere as “electric” since much of the buzz is over electrification. Electric cars, electric planes, electric-based autonomy, electron-based society.

As Captain Renault put it in Casablanca, we are shocked, shocked to find that auto industry surrogates are talking up 100% EU conversion to electric vehicles for light duty transport by 2040. Of course the idea that almost everyone in the EU would have to buy a new, expensive car I am sure has nothing to do with automaker enthusiasm. And enthusiasm from utilities for wind and solar has nothing to do with guaranteed cost recovery and high margin opportunities in the power sector.

Perhaps one day, we will no longer cloak self-interest in the toga of virtue, .... But we’ll have to take enlightened self-interest for now. And hope that in the hard data we’ll find that broad-based benefit rather than self-dealing is really, probably, hopefully, prayerfully at the bottom of the enthusiasm.

Batteries vs Liquids

There’s quite a bit of buzz in the EU over Power-to-X, or PtX, or P2X — the use of excess power to generate storable energy (such as liquid fuels) or other useful products or application — for example, using power to split water and combine hydrogen with CO2 to make materials or foods.

One of the more alluring aspects of this discussion is the use of excess renewable power at peak times (e.g. when the sun shines) to create a liquid fuel that stores easily and cheaply until wintertime (when the sun shines less, if at all). And, consider the potential to make hydrogen for fuel cells — or, in Nissan’s ethanol fuel cell, using a liquid storable to power an electric motor. No heavy battery, no slow recharge, no battery end of life, no kidding.

In the end, that’s what the entire discussion about vehicles using petroleum, biofuels, electricity, hybrids, CNG, LNG, hydrogen, fuel-cell, and possibly the enlightening power of song is all about: what’s the optimal energy storage system?

There’s little to no dissension about the appeal of electric motors, or the efficiency of using electricity to power mobility. The consternation has more to do with the supply of that energy — in mobile applications, that means energy storage. If you’ve felt occasionally frustrated about the challenges of keeping an iPhone charged when on the road, consider the problem of keeping a piece of equipment charged up that weighs 9,137 times more.

A setback at Green Biologics

Buzzing around the Eurohalls this week has been news that Green Biologics just shut down US operations and terminated the entire US organization with two days’ notice and no severance. The plant is now under new ownership, we’re not entirely sure who. Might be TCP.

What happened. A friend theorized, “I’d say it was entirely about cash cost of production vs market pricing and the willingness of market players to pay an extremely high premium for a green product. It’s a 32,000-ton plant and running a process plant efficiently requires utilization rates exceeding 70% and generally higher. It’s just math.”

Of BioGas and Gasification

The news on gas is, for now, less gloomy — biogas continues to have its broadest worldwide applications in the EU, but feed-in tariffs for power gen are reducing and operators are looking to liquids for higher values.

In the EU, there’s much buzz about BTG’s Empyro pyrolysis oil project, which was handed over to Twence in January.

Yet, at the ART Fuels Forum, there were far more questions than answers going round the rooms – How much jet fuel has Fulcrum produced, or will it produce, as opposed to waxes? For how long can Enerkem run its reactor in Alberta continuously at commercial-scale yields? How long can Velocys run its core reactor before coking fouls the catalyst or slows the process run time below commercially viable rates?

Yes, conspicuous failure across the street can inspire a rush for the exits, like a bank panic or the running of the bulls at Pamplona, but a conspicuous success across the street prompts a rush for someone else’s front door, too. People fall all over themselves to get on the band wagon, every technology everywhere gets left behind by Brand X’s failure or Brand A’s success, unless the differentiation is clear. Differentiation is the market force which selects winning companies, not winning ideas.

Franklin Roosevelt named four: freedom of expression, of worship, from want, from fear. The freedom to create value without harm to others, that could have been a fifth.

That’s the bioeconomy’s opportunity and its curse, to improve our circumstances and set ourselves a higher standard to live by, or die on the beach trying.

The great CEOs have a capacity to endure, right out of Shackleton by way of Amundsen. Yep, Pat (Gevo's Pat Gruber) has that. So do Jennifer Holmgren, Eric McAfee and John Melo, and Jim Macias, just to name a handful. You walk the lonely road alone, as Green Day observed in Boulevard of Broken Dreams. There are several dozen of them, sharing a remarkable quality of the type well summed up in Bridge of Spies: ...

The answers that technology provide are contained in the hard data but the data is best shared in saga form. It’s Robin Hood, Star Wars, the Knights of the Round Table: a problem, a solution, and bounties equitably shared.

You could call them first base, second base, third base. And what is home plate? That’s the permission to operate you’ll receive from those to whom you present — a permit, a funding, an offtake contract, a loan, a “yes, I’ll work for you”, a raw material, a willing customer.

The world is filled with all too many roads leading to No. But we only need one river to Yes, if we can find it.

After all, sagas are powerful and enduring. The wrathful strategic investor: Yahweh in the Noah’s Ark saga. The struggle over land use change: Cain and Abel. The commitment problem with sustainable feedstocks: Eve tempted by an apple. Labor trouble run amok: the escape of the Hebrews from Egypt. Destructive management rivalry: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The Bible has captivated us because it reveals its wisdom in stories rather than graphs.

From dust we came and to dust we shall return, yet in our own swift, short days of life in the sunshine, we have stories to tell, good stories, stories of technology, of living better and wiser through the power of science: these are our bioeconomy stories.

Tell them well and you’ll be asked to tell them often. And, after a long and difficult odyssey, your project will bloom, and your stakeholders will say yes it might as well be you as another, yes they’ll say yes they will Yes. READ MORE