Canadian Bioeconomy Conference and Exhibition: 40-minute Panel Discussion

Canadian Bioeconomy Conference and Exhibition: 40-minute Panel Discussion

On June 23, 2021, Jordan Solomon (President & CEO, Ecostrat; Chairman of the BDO Zone Initiaitve) participated as a panelist in the Canadian Bioeconomy Conference and Exhibition’s (CBCE) Scaling-Up Challenge, a panel discussion that highlighted the Circular Bioeconomy and the path to net-zero.

The session was moderated by Bob Larocque, (President, Canadian Fuels Association) and featured two other panelists: Matt Millard (General Manager, Tidewater Midstream) and Don Roberts (Chair of the Board of Arbios Biotech; CEO Nawitka Capital Advisors).

Below, the panelists addressed the common risk factors that can make or break a biobased project such as feedstock accessibility, government, finance, technology, and market risk:

SUMMARY OF PANELIST REMARKS

Jordan Solomon (CEO & President, Ecostrat Inc.; Chairman, BDO Zone Initiative

• “The BDO Zone Initiative is an initiative that catalyzes capital and drives investment to places across the country where those plants are most likely to succeed”.
• “Fundamentally, our ability to build out the clean energy infrastructure across the country, our ability to build the plants that make renewable chemicals, advanced biofuels, biogas, all of this depends to a large degree, how effectively we are able to leverage the capital markets. In order to do that, de-risking investment is key”.
• “The most important concept is redundancy and optionality. The way that the market tries to understand that, is not sufficiently nuanced enough to give them the answers that they need. It’s not accurate enough”.
• “A more nuanced approach to help capital markets and developers better understand feedstock risk can result in better-structured capital stacks that can withstand the headwinds that these plants most inevitably run into”.

Matt Millard (General Manager, Tidewater Midstream)

• “One of the [biggest challenges] is the regulatory certainty. Although the BC regulation is a challenging one, it’s been in place for about eight years and it is starting to provide a good economic model for development in the province”.
• “The opportunity for co-processing is the ability to take an existing asset capital that’s already invested and operating facilities and feed in a small volume of renewable feedstock. Through processing in the existing refinery, we are able to lower the carbon intensity”.
• “Scale is a challenge when it comes to co-processing. A lot of those units are not designed for renewable feedstocks and there are unique properties when it comes to processing renewable feed in a refinery that is designed for conventional hydrocarbons”.

Don Roberts (Chair of the Board of Arbios Biotech; CEO of Nawitka Capital Advisors)

• “There is clearly a recurring theme: collaboration”.
• “In this space, recognize that we are not dealing with software apps. The typical timeline from lab scale to a commercial-scale facility in this space is about ten years. These technologies have long gestation periods. It means you’ve got to have some patience – if it were easy you would have already done it”.
• “You’ve got to begin conversations early with key partners – it’s the feedstock folks, the offtake, and it’s the First Nations. That’s critical”.

Originally published at ecostrat.com.