Page 32 - Biorefinery 2030 Future Prospects for the Bioeconomy (2015)

Introduction xxxi

able to obtain some information from published financial databases and the
annual reports of the companies or groups under study.
• Face-to-face interviews with heads of industrial sites, research centres or dem-
onstration centres on the site were therefore the primary method used—on
condition, of course, that they welcomed the study. An interview guide was
used for each interview. Only one of the industrial firms on the site, belonging to
a French multinational group, did not manage to obtain authorisation from its
head office for visits from researchers or to communicate data. The researchers
undertook not to name the interviewees or to use data from the interviews
without prior authorisation.
• A postal questionnaire was also sent out to the three largest industrial firms
represented on the site to obtain standardised numerical data on economic
factors, investment and industrial symbiosis. The authors would like to express
their thanks to the directors and management of these three firms (in fact
belonging to two cooperatives) for having agreed to our requests for information,
without however giving them the right to publish these figures. The final text was
therefore proofread by the stakeholders before publication.
• The aim was not only to obtain as much information as possible by negotiating
confidentiality agreements with the different levels of management in each
company but also to produce a text that could be understood by
non-specialists. Therefore, the research team had to devote a certain amount of
time and energy to these “collateral” aspects of the research. It is probable that
researchers who wish to make a similar study will have to include these
constraints in their work plan. This is one of the reasons why we have included
a model case study in Appendix 1 that could serve as a reference for subsequent
studies.

What is the structure of the study?
Four remarks deserve mentioning concerning the structure:

• One of the principal topics of this study is that of time. To put the biorefinery in
context, the study goes back a century to describe certain historical roots and
nearly 70 years to its industrial starting point (1953). The Bazancourt-Pomacle
biorefinery cannot be understood without this long historical perspective, which
is not the case for biorefineries planned and setup recently.
• In terms of the present and the future, as explained above, the timescale used is
15 years (2015–2030). This timescale is one of the most difficult to deal with
methodologically. It stretches beyond the usual limits of forecasting in industrial
economics (3–5 years) since the decisions have already been taken by the actors,
and well within the 30–50 year strategic prospects, where uncertainty is very
great, leading to the use of scenario methods.