This book is dedicated to the memory of Mr Peter Schintlmeister (Austrian Federal Ministry of Economics, Family and Youth). We were deeply saddened and affected by Peter’s death in January 2017. At the time, Peter was chair of the OECD’s Working Party on Bio-, Nano- and Converging Technologies (BNCT). He was a stalwart of OECD efforts in industrial biotechnology for several years, and, known throughout Europe and beyond for championing the bioeconomy and the OECD’s work in this area.

The bioeconomy concept has emerged from niche interest to political mainstream with over 50 countries publishing bioeconomy policies and intentions. It has also grown from a biotechnology-centric vision to an economic activity that spreads across several key sectors and policy families: agriculture and forestry, fisheries, food, trade, waste management and industry. As a result, the bioeconomy policy environment is much more complex than before. One intention of this book is to reflect that changing environment. It sets out what a bioeconomy policy framework might look like based on the familiar innovation divisions of supply- and demand-side policies. It brings up to date the science and technology implications for policy makers.

The bioeconomy concept is expanding rapidly. Around 50 countries, including the G7, have either a national strategy or policies consistent with a future bioeconomy. While many published strategies have laudable goals for solving large societal problems, they lack policy detail. Moreover, the bioeconomy concept means different things in different nations. As a result, gathering comparable metrics is becoming a real challenge. For these reasons, a policy framework for a bioeconomy would be useful for countries to identify their relative strengths and weaknesses, fill policy gaps and understand the bigger picture for the international bioeconomy. This chapter provides an overview for such a framework.

This chapter is mainly about non-OECD countries and their developing bioeconomies. They are central to the development of a globalised bioeconomy and to the sustainable future of OECD countries’ bioeconomies. Future projections see the need for significantly increased agricultural output to feed a growing population. And yet there seems to be limited capacity for increased land use (extensification). This dilemma could bring OECD countries and partner economies into competing use for biomass. Many OECD countries will be net biomass importers, while many developing and poorer nations can be expected to be exporters of biomass. Nations could easily collide with each other through biomass disputes. A top priority for policy makers is to reconcile the food and industrial demands of biomass to prevent negative effects in some nations being created through positive effects in others. A sustainable bioeconomy cannot be produced through such poorly distributed benefits.

This chapter examines the issues around setting biomass sustainability as an essential element to a future bioeconomy. Use of biomass for bio-based production in ambitious bioeconomy plans is fraught with the risk of unsustainable, over-exploitation of natural resources. Developing only modest bioeconomy strategies is one option, but may not achieve the longer-term goals of highly ambitious reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Another option is to create ambitious bioeconomy plans that make biomass production and use more efficient. However, studies also point out that more land is needed to produce biomass. So a dual strategy can be envisioned – land intensification and extensification. Each brings its own problems; the most frequently discussed relate to sustainability, and the inevitable competition for land between food and industrial use. There is no international agreement yet on how to measure biomass sustainability. As a result, estimates of biomass potential (how much can be grown sustainably) vary greatly. New institutions may be necessary to harmonise sustainability assessments.

This chapter focuses on biotechnology in food production and the future roles of marine biotechnology. Given the extensive discourse on competing uses of biomass in food and industry, this is an important area for policy makers. If land extensification possibilities are limited, and agricultural productivity is declining, the industrial use of biomass would also be limited. Even as other forms of biomass are being sought as biorefinery feedstocks, agricultural productivity and sustainability need to be improved. The yield increase of the so-called green revolution in modern agriculture from the 1950s is flattening out. In addition, agricultural practices with higher inputs, such as pesticides and fertilisers to ensure high yields, are not considered environmentally sustainable. Therefore, the contributions of biotechnology to land extensification and intensification will be crucial in future. In addition, the marine environment remains a virtually untapped resource.

This chapter explores biorefinery models and their status, setting the stage for later chapters that focus more on public policy. Biorefinery models have evolved according to needs from the first ethanol mills using food crops as feedstocks to more complex (and more expensive) models using feedstocks other than food crops. The ultimate goal is the widespread application of the integrated biorefinery that can use multiple feedstocks and generate multiple products (fuels, chemicals, materials, electricity). However, these are still not ready for the market and are seen as high-risk investments. Building the first-ofkind flagship plants is proving difficult. Meanwhile, marine biorefineries, which offer similar advantages, remain difficult to design and build. And other yet more novel biorefinery concepts are arising.

This chapter concentrates on the “commercialisation” and “scalable production” phases of biorefineries, i.e. demonstration and full-scale production. First-of-kind projects are high risk, and financing options dry up as a project approaches “scalable production”. The early stage in the era of biorefining faces multiple barriers, including technical issues, public opinion, lack of supply, and value chains and lack of trained personnel. Small- to medium-scale biorefining is often cast as a rural manufacturing activity to be close to feedstocks such as agricultural products and residues and forestry. However, this smaller-scale distributed model competes directly with some of the largest global (and fossil-based) manufacturing industries. These factors, alongside lack of confidence in public policy, add up to high levels of financial risk in biorefineries for the private sector. This has led to various forms of public-private partnerships to give the private sector concrete commitment from governments in order to make biorefineries a production mode of the future.

Vast tonnages of organic waste materials are available worldwide, which seems to circumvent concerns about using food crops as feedstocks for biorefining. The idea of using organic waste is consistent with other major policy goals, especially a circular economy, which minimises waste generation and promotes a greater level of recycling in society. Biorefining of such “biowastes” goes further: it takes materials that are effectively worthless and turns them into value-added products. But are these materials really waste? What of municipal waste as a feedstock? Is the completely rural setting the optimum location, or does a coastal-rural location make more sense when agriculture is out-of-season? This chapter explores such questions, as well as the potential for public policy clashes

Much innovation has been achieved in biorefining in the last few years, often in the absence of significant policy support. This chapter highlights the potential of biorefining to replace fossil-derived manufacturing in terms of materials that can be produced. While the examples demonstrate that a wide variety of materials is already available in the market, the chapter also gives a sense of perspective: the real test for the future of bio-production in manufacturing is its ability to produce all these promising materials at a scale appropriate to society.

In recent years, the absence of policy support for bio-based chemicals and materials production in the face of huge support for both biofuels and bioenergy has been a matter of contention. This lopsided emphasis has serious consequences for integrated biorefineries of the future. It systematically allocates (subsidised) biomass to fuels and energy applications; as a result, opportunities for high value-added and greater job creation could be missed. If lessons from petro-fining are any indication, lack of support for bio-based chemicals and materials production may completely throw the economics of integrated biorefinery operation into doubt. This chapter examines policy options that will start to address the situation from economic, environmental and social perspectives. It aims to help governments implement policy support for bio-based materials that can be consistent with that for national biofuels. This would be a cost-efficient mechanism that uses existing support policies and conditions rather than creating a separate support scheme with its own infrastructure and bureaucracy.

Metabolic engineering and synthetic biology are the core platform technologies relevant to “replacing the oil barrel”. As it stands, both technologies have proven successful in basic science and in laboratory-scale applications. Their translation into bioeconomy products to date has been limited, however, often for technical reasons. This chapter identifies some of the successes, but also highlights the areas where governments could fund pre-competitive and near-market research to increase the rate of success in commercialisation. A bioeconomy presents a large conundrum, creating competition for biomass between food and industrial production. The chapter also examines the biotechnology of industrial production of bio-based materials. Ethanol, while important, is not a specific focus. A recurring theme is the need for systems integration of computational and experimental approaches, a key message for policy makers.

This chapter examines education and training for industrial biotechnology, a field that calls for education outside of normal disciplinary boundaries. Many factors in the education and training of industrial biotechnologists point to multi-disciplinarity. This has been discussed many times, but has been elusive in practice. The most obvious combination of skills needed is synthetic biology or genetic engineering with “green” chemistry, with the reduction-to-practice skills provided by chemical engineering. Other mathematical skills are also important. But for employment in small companies, employees also need to be flexible and willing to multi-task and get soft tasks done. This often does not suit a PhD graduate as doctoral training remains specialist, long-term and driven by publication. Although these issues could have been part of a capacity building discussion in this book, the significant policy implications warrant their own chapter.