by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) This past week, a remarkable group of people gathered in Ottawa, perhaps described best as the “friends of Jeff” because the ostensible excuse for a get-together was Jeff Passmore’s Scaling Up Conference and because, to no surprise amongst those who know him well, Jeff has a legion of friends and no more so than in the corner of the advanced bioeconomy dedicated to deploying technology at scale.
The who’s who of delegates were packed in like spam in a can at Ottawa’s elegant Chateau Laurier, but the timing was good and the topic is right — now only for Canada but for the entire verdant world: what’s the hold-up in taking this technology wave to economies of scale where the products are affordable and their carbon and energy security attributes would change the world?
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But Canada is home to four companies who have done the “hard yards of commercialization” and scaled up their technologies — Ensyn, Iogen, Enerkem, and BioAmber. Though these days Ensyn is as much as US company as Canadian, and though Iogen is deploying in Brazil.
But to steal from James Carville, “it’s feedstock, stupid”. Though Canada may well scale-up a host of new technologies for bioconversion, the real asset north of the border lies in its massive Crown lands, and feedstock resources. All those lovely Christmas trees and the residues that the agricultural and municipal waste streams are replete with: Canada stands to win on deployment if they can master and muster the sustainable, affordable, reliable and available feedstock. That was a consensus in Ottawa this week.
But there was another gigantic presence hanging over the stage, attracting more chatter than the potential for deployment. That was the situation with Donald Trump and the US Presidency.
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If there was one statement in Scaling Up that resonated more than any others, it was Robert Graham’s view, looking back on Ensyn’s path from pilot to scale, that “you have to have skin in the game” to scale up.
He said that there was no substitute for a group of people who had everything they owned wrapped up in a technology, who had nowhere to go in the case of failure, and everything to win with success.
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Former Canadian cabinet minister Monte Solberg was on hand to describe to the assemblage “how to get through to people”, especially government people.
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“Governments are motivated by taking credit and avoiding blame. How can you give them a win? … ”
Above all, he said, use stories, anecdotes, and examples. “Support with data, facts and evidence — but don’t lead with it. Your goal is to tell a story that they like to tell, like a success story — and then your message will resonate. See the right people in the right order.
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Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green Party in the Canadian parliament, said that “no one in Marrakesh won’t follow through on climate pledges because Trump is president elect.”
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Universally agreed among the delegates — regardless of the state of scale-up of technology, the biomass supply chains have to be financeable and the biomass itself has to be affordable. Nothing is getting built at 20 percent interest rates as numerous projects have been quoted.
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Were the government to guarantee an affordable cost of biomass, he said, competitive markets would generally bring in costs at much lower rates and government support need not be tapped. Yet, by lopping off the potential of biomass price risk, the cost of financing technologies at scale would be vastly reduced.
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Conifex’s Sandy Ferguson …. Power generation based on the wood basket offered forestry companies like Conifex less exposure to lumber price volatility and currency fluctuations, plus cash flow stability and improved site economics. In turn, the forestry industry has “supply chain management expertise, opportunities for site integration with sawmills, fully permitted sites, reduced capital costs from existing infrastructure, available water, gas and power, and well-developed rail links.” READ MORE