In mid-March 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released one of the early deliverables of the Bioeconomy Initiative: a report on how to build the supply chain of raw materials needed for biomanufacturing at scale.
In 2022, the Biden administration in the United States reportedly launched the country's first-ever national bioeconomy program, the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative. 
The report, Building a Resilient Biomass Supply: A Plan to Boost the U.S. Bioeconomy, identifies the raw material potential of the U.S. as well as bottlenecks to the development of the bioeconomy, including the regulation and infrastructure needed to flow biomass to industry. We delve into its contents for key recommendations.
How much biomass will the U.S. have?
The 2022 National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative commits $2 billion to improve its ability to utilize biological resources to make high-value products, such as alternative proteins, pharmaceutical biotechnology, and sustainable agricultural inputs.
The program requires USDA and many other government agencies to prepare an initial report on how the program will be implemented, leading USDA to recently prepare a report on resilient biomass supply.
The report begins with a basic question: how much biomass will be available for biomanufacturing in 2040?
To answer this question, USDA's supply chain report draws heavily on the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) 2016 Stock Assessment estimates of biomass supply. In its 2016 calculations, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that the U.S. would have 365 million tons of biomass by 2040 if we consider well-established traditional sources. These are primarily wood and corn ethanol - the traditional feedstocks that the U.S. bioeconomy uses primarily for bioenergy.
Sources of underdevelopment
However, these traditional sources will not be sufficient if the U.S. bioeconomy is to grow and diversify from bioenergy to food ingredients, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural inputs as envisioned in the U.S. Bioeconomy Plan.
In order to maximize feedstock supply, the U.S. bioeconomy will also have to take advantage of currently underutilized and low-value non-food crops. Incorporating these into the supply chain could ease competition for land between the bio-industry and agribusinesses that produce food for human consumption.
If these untapped resources are utilized, the U.S. Department of Energy projects that the U.S. biomass supply will increase to 1.2 billion tons in 2040.
This potential 826 million ton increment will come from forestry woody biomass, agricultural residues, wastes, and underutilized, little-known biomass energy crops that are not yet mature enough to be marketed, but may become more developed in the coming decades.
This depends on the large-scale introduction of non-traditional sources such as woody biomass and lesser-known crops such as camellia sinensis, pannikas and carinata into the supply chain.
These supply estimates provided by DoE do not represent the total national tonnage of material harvested from fields. Instead, it expresses only a fraction of the harvestable biomass available for industrial use (there are other uses for this material). In addition, they are limited by the amount of biomass that can be sustainably utilized - there is only so much biomass that can be utilized without having a devastating impact on the environment, and this limitation has been taken into account.
Emerging sources?
There is also the potential to further increase biomass supply, as emerging supply is still far from being ready for a scaled market.
The supply chain report used for the 2016 U.S. Department of Energy supply estimate does not take into account these factors:Non-commodity biomass from macroalgae (considered a huge potential source of biomass), oilseed crops, hazardous fuels, natural disaster relief, municipal wood waste, utility maintenance treatments, and forest restoration treatments.
Although these emerging sources were included in the most recent update to the DOE Biomass Supply Inventory in March 2024, the data had not been published at the time of the supply chain report.
Reaching 1 billion tons means market building
Non-conventional biomass resources not only expand the amount of raw materials available to industry, but also make it possible to expand supply more sustainably.
The report of the United States Department of Agriculture recognizes that the expansion of biomass for non-food biomanufacturing could drive up commodity prices, thereby affecting food security. Underutilized crops are critical in this regard, as these species can be grown as cover crops on existing farmland or on poor-quality land that is not suitable for growing food.
However, expanding into any new market faces a recurring dilemma:Suppliers won't commit resources to new forms of production unless they know there's a market they can sell into that's big enough to recoup their investment.
The U.S. bioeconomy is no exception: farmers will not change crops or expand acreage if they believe they cannot find buyers. This creates a significant barrier to the large-scale manufacture of non-traditional plant materials.
For example, perennial grasses, shrub willows, and hemp could all be valuable and potentially sustainable feedstocks for the U.S. bioeconomy, but they are low-value crops today because of low demand.
Even in the best of circumstances, agriculture is a high-risk, low-return investment. Growing new crops is expensive, takes months to mature and can take years to pay off, which means that stable regulation is essential to encourage biomass suppliers to participate in bioeconomy programs.
To convince investors and farmers to take this step, the report encourages policymakers to develop long-term policy and regulatory guidelines specific to bioeconomy programs to reduce producer risk and encourage participation. USDA has indicated that it is looking at ways to develop existing and new incentive programs to help achieve this goal.
The report also noted that producer risk could also be reduced through the promotion of cooperatives, financial safety nets for value chain capacity building, and the development of by-product markets.
Uncertainty in the economics of woody biomass
Certainty around strong market demand is one factor that influences the business decisions of farmers and landowners. Another is the economic viability of producing certain crops.
Even if there is a demand for low-value but sustainable biomass, the cost of growing biomass may exceed the cost of transportation, storage and pre-processing. Reducing the cost of converting biomass feedstocks into useful substances requires investment in new technologies and infrastructure adapted to these specific crops.
This point on infrastructure applies to a large extent to woody biomass. Such feedstocks are any forest residues or wood mill wastes and decaying wood from plantations and forests that would otherwise be waste.
Woody biomass has been recognized by science and policy development as a potentially large and sustainable source of feedstock for the bioeconomy. However, pre-processing this often heterogeneous quality feedstock is one of the most costly aspects of current biomass supply systems. The economics of a complete industrial bio-value chain based on woody biomass have also not been tested on a large scale in the United States. This means that there is little concrete understanding of how to make them viable.
Steps have been taken to explore and refine the economics of the woody biomass supply chain. The Idaho National Laboratory has developed a test-bed center called the Biomass Feedstock National User Facility (BFNUF) specifically for this purpose to enable the industry to explore new pretreatment routes to efficiently convert a wide range of organics into industrial feedstocks.
Logistics: from farm to factory
After evaluating the potential biomass, the report details how the U.S. is building logistics to connect farms and the bioindustry.
While raw quantities of biomass are great, how it is collected, transported, sorted and prepared for industrial use is also critical. Effective logistics infrastructure and processes will determine whether biomass can truly be valued.
It said that regional biomass warehouses were very important in that regard. They will allow the collection of biomass feedstocks from different locations and even basic pre-treatment to convert different biomasses into alternative feedstocks. By allowing for single-point collection and pre-processing, regional warehouses can reduce the cost of transporting materials to a centralized biorefinery, which itself should be located near a transportation hub.
Warehouses can serve as key infrastructure nodes where feedstocks made from different materials and coming from different sources in the surrounding area (cultivated crops and waste streams) can be transformed into consistent products ready to be ordered by biorefineries. Strategically located warehouses provide easy access to multiple sources of raw materials and provide centralized services. This reduces capital costs compared to building multiple sites in one area.
Longer frames
There is a long way to go before we see the U.S. bioeconomy plan translated into greater bio-based production capacity, as it is still in the planning stage. The plan calls for about 40 scoping tasks to be undertaken by many government agencies on the policy, economic and technical aspects of the new bioeconomy. So far, only a few have been completed.
However, since the size of the raw material pool and supply chain infrastructure is a major limiting factor in the size of the bioeconomy, the USDA report marks an important step in implementing the plan.
Finally, bioeconomy programs also need support and coordination from other policy areas. A good example is agriculture. In agriculture, policymakers need to assess the types of crops, technologies and economic support needed to produce 1.2 billion tons of biomass in a more volatile climate.
