Episode 41 - The State of the Bioeconomy with Jim Lane and Sara Lee

In this episode I had the great pleasure of catching up on the global bioeconomy with Jim Lane, a global champion of the biobased economy with his daily publication The Digest and semi-annual ABLC events. Over the past 12 months, a lot has been happening in the bioeconomy, and we had the chance to catch up on Bold Goals, renewable fuels and feedstocks, among other things.

Our discussions opened around one of Jim’s keynote messages – it’s all about the feedstocks! While the energy transition is underway, we discuss the importance of molecules as part of the future energy mix. Jim reckons that accessibility to feedstocks, and not the conversion costs associated with process technologies, is the emerging bottleneck in scaling and acceleration the transition away from fossil resources. We touch on a range of current and emerging solutions including residues (which he sees as a significant pathway), cover crops and tree crops!

Jim introduced the 'zoning problem'. He makes the observation that feedstocks are getting punished rather than producers acting in bad faith, and this is distorting the availability and social license of some options. He sees the greatest challenge in logistics, delivering densified, uniform, standardised raw materials to refinery operations and we explored whether biomass gasification should / could be a pathway solving these challenges.

While Sustainable Aviation Fuel has drawn a lot of the headlines over the past few years, we explored the rising demand from the marine sector – from Jet Zero to Wet Zero. We touch on the greater optionality that the marine sector has for liquid fuel solutions. And with Jet and Wet discussed, we move onto Debt Zero and the need for financing to get the first of kind and next of kind plants up to scale to drive returns and lower risk for the industry.

Jim and I then explore some of the broader challenges in the bioeconomy, specifically the marketing challenge that the industry has around positioning with consumers to drive uptake of products. We have a little Don Draper reflection, around changing the conversation and Jim makes the excellent observation that shaming customers really doesn’t work! Marketing also gets some further discussion as we reflect on alternative protein and cellular agriculture.

We close out our conversation reflecting on the Bold Goals initiative (which started 12 months ago) and talk of the 10-billion-ton study. Jim closes out with the acronym of the year – as nobody does it like Sara Lee!