1. Scope

Keywords

Rationale

Rapid scale-up of the Canadian bioeconomy is critical to support the goal of a viable and sustainable domestic industry that produces biofuels, renewable chemicals, bioproducts, biogas, and biopower. A key bottleneck inhibiting progress is the lack of transparency between local biomass supply chains, bioproject developers, and governments. There is a disconnect between communities with suitable biomass assets, infrastructure, and support for biomanufacturing, and developers who are seeking such locations. This leads to developers spending months or years searching for suitable project development sites, assessing biomass feedstock availability and costs, building relationships, securing contracts, and obtaining community buy-in. Meanwhile, regions with ideal characteristics to support biobased project development have no credible and recognized way to signal their biomanufacturing readiness, and are effectively lost to biobased development. These inefficiencies hamper project development speed, increase the likelihood of project failure, and function as barriers to scale up the multi-billion-dollar Canadian bioeconomy. This Document is intended to help determine the degree to which geographic regions are able to supply biomass feedstock in a commercial manner and support the construction and operation of biomanufacturing projects. It provides a framework for analyzing a bioeconomy development opportunity (BDO) zone and assessing a specific region’s suitability for biomanufacturing projects. Transparent and credible BDO zone assessment criteria enable clear and powerful signals of regional readiness for biomanufacturing for biobased developers and investors worldwide, accelerate and de-risk project development, and support key national objectives of sustainable economic growth and decarbonization.