Abstract
The tenth anniversary of the BIO World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology—held June 16–19 in Montreal, Canada—is a notable event in our industry's collective history. It provides a chronological touchstone and a reference point for where we have been over the last decade as well as a potent symbolic launching point for greater things to come.
The very first BIO World Congress, held in 2004 in Orlando, Florida, gathered just over 300 scientists and business executives. Attendees met to create a vision of the bioeconomy—combining chemistry, biotechnology, and agriculture to create new value chains—and to share the biological breakthroughs needed to achieve it. In those early days, we talked a lot about the promise of industrial biotechnology. Today, with more than 1,200 attendees from 30 countries attending the BIO World Congress, the industry is talking about the robust reality of a growing range of consumer products made possible through industrial biotechnology.
The diversity of the World Congress attendees demonstrates that our shared vision of a bioeconomy is a global one. And that is because climate change and population growth create global challenges—higher demand for resources and potentially reduced resource availability—that require sustainable long-term solutions. As Dato' Dr. Nazlee Kamal, CEO of Malaysia's BiotechCorp, put it during the opening plenary session of the 2013 World Congress, “A global biobased economy is the way forward as it addresses key sustainable development challenges affecting the world.”
In the early years of the World Congress, there were a prolific number of ideas for new feedstocks and agricultural biotechnology applications to increase production. Today, the industry is engaging in partnerships for energy crops that are economically viable both for producers and downstream users, as participants discussed during a plenary panel at the 2013 World Congress. The vision for the future remains to get more from each acre of crops while reducing their footprint and harvesting costs.
At past conferences, advanced biofuels were the dominant topic. But this year, renewable chemicals eclipsed biofuels as topic number one. In addition, sustainability remains a watchword for many of the downstream chemicals and plastics users, the brand owners who directly connect with consumers. Because consumers are demanding more environmentally healthy products, those brand owners must watch the entire value chain from raw material through production to disposal and other end-of-life options. As Jack Huttner, president of Huttner Strategies and one of the founders of BIO's Industrial & Environmental Section, noted while moderating a plenary panel this year, “Only by integrating and focusing together on solving and anticipating issues are we going to be able to really deliver on the promise we've been talking about for the last 15 years.”
In the weeks leading up to and during the 2013 World Congress, several companies made significant news announcements about commercial production starting up or new production off-take agreements. Myriant (Quincy, MA), for example, announced the successful start-up of its flagship bio-succinic acid plant in Lake Providence, Louisiana. The plant is the first of its kind and scale in North America, with an annual production capacity of 30 million pounds of bio-succinic acid, which is used in polymers, urethanes, plasticizers, and coatings. By 2020, planned production capacity for biopolymers will grow to 12 million tons, representing 3% of a 400 million ton market, according to a recent report from nova-Institut (
Among the other news items during the event was Gevo's (Englewood, CO) announcement that it has restarted commercial production of biobutanol in Luverne, Minnesota. Commercialization of biofuels has been one of the major success stories for the industry and the realization of part of the industry's early promise. Production of first-generation biofuel—ethanol and biodiesel—has increased from less than 2 billion gallons to almost 14 billion gallons in the past decade. The ethanol industry generated around $40 billion in value last year.
This year, two cellulosic biofuel plants, those of INEOS Bio (Rolle, Switzerland) in Vero Beach, Florida and KiOR (Pasadena, TX) in Columbus, Mississippi, are in commissioning stages, expected to begin commercial production. Companies that over the past 10 years have discussed and planned commercialization of these technologies have now invested more than $5 billion in projects in nearly every state. Additional cellulosic biofuel plants are under construction—Abengoa (Seville, Spain) in Hugoton, Kansas, POET-DSM (Elgin, IL) in Emmettsburg, Iowa, and DuPont (Wilmington, DE) in Nevada, Iowa—and expected to begin production over the next several years. Many more are being planned, including Chemtex (Wilmington, NC) in North Carolina and GranBio (São Paulo, Brazil) in Brazil. All of these companies continue to use BIO's World Congress as a platform for partnerships and progress, as we envisioned when founding the conference.
There was more discussion, too, about using industrial biotech in the pharmaceutical sector. Dr. Jay Keasling, this year's George Washington Carver Award winner, talked a good deal about how synthetic biology can revolutionize the drug industry. And several companies gave presentations at workshops dealing with industrial biotech pharmaceutical intermediates.
I am gratified to have participated in and witnessed the emergence of this industry and tracked its progress each year at the World Congress. And I hope everyone in the industry finds the opportunity to re-imagine the shared vision of the bioeconomy and recharge their commitment. As Jim Lane, editor of Biofuels Digest, noted during the closing plenary session this year, if everyone on the planet had the same energy footprint as the average American citizen, the world would need 6 times more energy than it uses today. “So you have a choice,” he said. “Develop these technologies, find another planet, or find a reason to deny your neighbor the lifestyle you enjoy.” Finding sustainable long-term solutions to energy and food security is a vision worth pursuing. And I can't wait to see what the next 10 years will bring from this industry.