Scaling up: The bioeconomy’s 30-year challenge

Bio-based chemicals have the potential to partly replace fossil fuels in applications like fertilisers and plastics, but the transition will take decades and there are still big challenges ahead to scale up production without harming the environment, scientists say.

The bioeconomy in Europe has come of age since the European Commission first launched its bio-based industry joint undertaking more than 10 years ago.

“If you look how we started out since 2012 … we actually moved from a predominantly bio-based fuels focus on bioenergy towards more higher-value products such as polymers, chemicals, and bioactive compounds,” says Kevin O’Connor, professor of applied microbiology and biotechnology at University College, Dublin.

At the time, many thought the bioeconomy was about replacing fossil with bio-based products one-for-one, O’Connor told a recent stakeholder forum of the EU’s Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU).

“But it’s not,” O’Connor told participants. “It’s about looking at your resources, keeping them at the highest value possible and minimising the use of that resource in areas where you think you’re going to generate waste”.

“So it’s very much about prevention and minimisation,” he said at the Brussels event, on 6 December.

The EU’s ill-fated experience with biofuels has indeed dealt the EU’s bioeconomy strategy a near-fatal blow.

Back in 2007, EU policymakers adopted targets to ramp up biofuels in transport only to make a U-turn eight years later when they realised increased biofuel production from dedicated crops like rapeseed or corn was diverting land away from food, causing more harm than good to the environment.

Now, the EU is emphasising second-generation biofuels, which have a lower environmental footprint because they come as a by-product of forestry or agriculture.

Producing biofuels that way is “okay in my view,” O’Connor said. “But don’t make biofuels your primary product, otherwise you’re going to encounter environmental issues when going up to scale,” he told Euractiv in an interview.

Bioresources from the oceans

O’Connor sits on the scientific committee of the CBE JU, which has €2 billion in funding from the EU’s research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe. At a stakeholder forum in Brussels on 6 December, CBE JU members sat down to devise what could be their research agenda up to 2050.

For them, the end objectives remain the same – replacing petroleum-based materials with bio-based ones. However, the approach is different this time, focusing on marine resources and municipal waste rather than dedicated crops for fuel production.

According to scientists, 80% of the biodiversity and 50% of primary biomass is coming from marine ecosystems. “So we need to start looking more closely to the biological resources coming from there,” said Fabio Fava, the vice-chair of a group representing EU member states in the CBE JU.

For example, mangroves and salt marches from coastal areas can be “interesting feedstocks” to produce bio-based chemicals for all kinds of applications, said Fava, who is a Professor at the University of Bologna in Italy.

Together with green algae and sea grasses, “they can be interesting resources from which we can prepare chemical materials,” he said at the forum.

One of the key applications researchers are looking into is to produce biobased plastics that can replace petroleum products, Fava said. “And then we need to deal with biodegradation because we don’t only need biobased but biodegradable plastics. And here, we need to assess more efficiently under which conditions this is taking place.”

But phasing out plastics will require more than biobased solutions, O’Connor pointed out, saying prevention and minimisation will also be key.

“That way, we can envisage replacing fossil plastics with bio-based alternatives – for example by using bio-based biodegradable for plastics such as those coming in contact with food,” he said. And for other applications like plastic bottles, recycling is going to be a more obvious choice, he adds, emphasising the need to reduce plastic consumption in the first place.

The key though is to avoid repeating past mistakes made with biofuels and place the emphasis on feedstocks that have a low environmental footprint.

“We don’t want to do the same mistakes in the ocean that we have done in the land. We don’t want to extract and apply a linear thinking model,” said Helena Vieira, Chair of CBE JU Scientific Committee and ERA Chair Holder at the University of Aveiro in Portugal.

That, for example, involves tapping into the 140 million tonnes of municipal waste produced every year in Europe.

“We are only using 40% of it, mostly to produce compost, biogas and digestate,” Fava remarked. “I think we need to be more ambitious here – we need to produce more chemical material from that feedstock,” notably thanks to multi-purpose biorefineries that can take different feedstocks coming from agriculture, forestry or municipal waste.

Scaling up – the next step

The big challenge, at the end of the day, is to scale up production in a way that is economically profitable – without harming the environment.

Europe currently has “a huge variety of small-scale products” that haven’t been “upscaled to a full-blown bioeconomy yet”, said Greet Maenhout, from the European Commission’s joint research centre.

And to upscale production, standards will be needed at the EU level to ensure the end products are consistent. “If we think of sustainability criteria, this is not so trivial,” she said.

O’Connor agrees with this, saying the next step for research is to develop multi-feedstock biorefineries. However, this flexibility in taking different kinds of feedstocks is “a huge challenge” that requires a lot of research, he pointed out.

“What we currently have is individual bio-refineries taking single feedstocks,” O’Connor told Euractiv. “The next phase of development will be bio-refineries that can take multiple feedstocks, so they can hedge economically and take a certain bio-based resource that’s available for example from Spring until Autumn and other feedstocks in winter.”

“We need more biorefinery and scale-up demonstration sites across Europe to help scale and accelerate the transition away from fossil and towards biobased products,” he said.

But O’Connor is also quick to play down expectations, warning that any attempt to phase out fossil fuels in fertilisers, for instance, will take 15-20 years at the very best.

“Price is always the challenge,” he explains, saying the core issue is to incentivise change. “So the overall answer is yes, we can remove fossil-based fertilisers, but it’s going to take time, and it requires innovation, and investment.”

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]

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