Biobased economy


Biobased economy, bioeconomy or biotechonomy refers to economic activity involving the use of biotechnology in the production of goods, services, or energy from biological material as the primary resource base. The terms are widely used by regional development agencies, national and international organizations, and biotechnology companies. They are closely linked to the evolution of the biotechnology industry and the capacity to study, understand, and manipulate genetic material that has been possible due to scientific research and technological development. This includes the application of scientific and technological developments to agriculture, health, chemical, and energy industries.
An important aspect of the bioeconomy is understanding mechanisms and processes at the genetic, molecular, and genomic levels, and applying this understanding to creating or improving industrial processes, developing new products and services, and producing new energy.
The term 'biotechonomy' was used by Juan Enríquez and Rodrigo Martinez at the Genomics Seminar in the 1997 AAAS meeting. An excerpt of this paper was published in Science."

History

Enríquez and Martinez' 2002 Harvard Business School working paper, "Biotechonomy 1.0: A Rough Map of Biodata Flow", showed the global flow of genetic material into and out of the three largest public genetic databases: GenBank, EMBL and DDBJ. The authors then hypothesized about the economic impact that such data flows might have on patent creation, evolution of biotech startups and licensing fees. An adaptation of this paper was published in Wired magazine in 2003.
The term 'bioeconomy' became popular from the mid-2000s with its adoption by the European Union and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as a policy agenda and framework to promote the use of biotechnology to develop new products, markets, and uses of biomass. Since then, both the EU and OECD have created dedicated bioeconomy strategies, as have an increasing number of countries around the world. Often these strategies conflate the bioeconomy with the term 'bio-based economy'. For example, since 2005 the Netherlands has sought to promote the creation of a biobased economy. Pilot plants have been started i.e. in Lelystad, and a centralised organisation exists, with supporting research being conducted. Other European countries have also developed and implemented bioeconomy or bio-based economy policy strategies and frameworks.
In 2012 president Barack Obama of the USA announced intentions to encourage biological manufacturing methods, with a National Bioeconomy Blueprint.

In practice

The biobased economy uses first-generation biomass, second-generation biomass, and third-generation biomass. Several methods of processing are then used to gather the most out of the biomass. This includes techniques such as
Anaerobic digestion is generally used to produce biogas, fermentation of sugars produces ethanol, pyrolysis is used to produce pyrolysis-oil, and torrefaction is used to create biomass-coal. Biomass-coal and biogas is then burnt for energy production, ethanol can be used as a -fuel, as well as for other purposes, such as skincare products.

Getting the most out of the biomass

For economic reasons, the processing of the biomass is done according to a specific pattern. This pattern depends on the types of biomass used. The whole of finding the most suitable pattern is known as biorefining. A general list shows the products with high added value and lowest volume of biomass to the products with the lowest added value and highest volume of biomass:
Organisms, ranging from bacteria over yeasts up to plants are used for production of enzymatic catalysis. Genetically modified bacteria have been used to produce insulin, artemisinic acid was made in engineered yeast. Some bioplastics that is able to break down PET into other substances has been genetically modified to break down PET even faster and also break down PEF. Once plastics are broken down and recycled into other substances it can be used as an input for other animals.
Genetically modified crops are also used. Genetically modified energy crops for instance may provide some additional advantages such as reduced associated costs and less water use. One example are trees have been genetically modified to either have less lignin, or to express lignin with chemically labile bonds.
With genetically modified crops however, there are still some challenges involved.