Page 142 - Biorefinery 2030 Future Prospects for the Bioeconomy (2015)

110 Annexes

Studying bio-refineries from an economic, social and environmental perspective
has become a priority in the context of a future industrial bio-economy that
endeavours to replace an oil-based economy by a bio-based economy.
In practice, implementing an industrial bio-economy involves creating
bio-refineries. As a result, governments, industrialists, investors, analysts and,
more broadly, the public at large need to understand better the potential effective-
ness of bio-refineries.
The template below aims to encourage bio-refinery case studies that, if possible,
would cover similar themes and indicators. Thus, the data gathered would enable
comparisons between different types of bio-refineries processing different types of
biomass, with different methods of organisation, across multiple countries. It would
be too ambitious at this stage to hope for perfect comparability, but a first step
towards the harmonisation of reference terms would enable useful lessons to be
drawn from a fairly wide variety of concrete cases.
The model described hereafter concerns in particular bio-refineries that are an
integral part of an ecosystem and come as close as possible to forming a circular
economy. That is, they start with biomass and return to biomass at the end of the
lifecycle, while minimising the costs and externalities of the bioconversion process
and maximising the social and economic benefits.
As is the case with any new economic field, in particular one that prefigures a
transformation of society, the bioeconomy poses a knowledge challenge owing to
the absence of common international definitions, databases and published impact
measurements. This is why only a series of international case studies of
bio-refineries can provide enough data to satisfy stakeholder needs: governments
and regulators to base their public policies, investors and insurers to assess the risk
levels, industrialists to choose the right scale for their projects, and citizens to
support or question this transformation.
A major pre-requisite for the success of such an initiative lies in the question of
the function of the project: “Who is asking for these studies? Who can finance
them? For what reasons?”
As shown by the multilateral experience of the OECD over the last 50 years in
2
different fields, often six or seven willing member countries are at the origin of
initiatives to harmonise definitions, indicators and data collection procedures. It is
therefore to be hoped that this will also happen in the field of industrial
bioeconomy.
In this particular case, the first indications are that the private sector in Europe, in
North America and Latin America is ready to cooperate on such studies in spite of
the confidentiality problems that may arise. Biorefinery operators include all types
3
of firms with different disclosure requirements. However, all have one thing in
common: the issue of confidentiality in a very competitive field. Under such
circumstances, much of the data sought for a case study is confidential. The

2
Frascati manual, Oslo manual, Canberra group, handbook on the space sector economy etc.
3
Family businesses, agricultural cooperatives, stock market listed firms etc.