BIC does NOT stand for Bio-Industrial Complex, but for Bio-based Industries Consortium. It defines itself as “the private partner in the €3.7 billion Public-Private Partnership on Bio-based Industries with the EU”, has 72 industrial members and 169 non-industrial members. Sounds impressive, but what do they do?
BIC does NOT stand for Bio-Industrial Complex, but for Bio-based Industries Consortium. It defines itself as “the private partner in the €3.7 billion Public-Private Partnership on Bio-based Industries with the EU”, has 72 industrial members and 169 non-industrial members. Sounds impressive, but what do they do?
In 2014, they set up the Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU) together with the EU, represented by the European Commission. Operating under Horizon 2020, the BBI JU is driven by the Vision and Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda (SIRA). This SIRA is now under being revised, as it moves from its initial emphasis on “what resources do we have and what can we do with them?” to “what do we need and how can we fulfil these needs using renewable resources?”.
You may wander where all that money goes.
Here is an example: one of the flagship projects is PULP2VALUE, which aims to extract more value than that of cattle feed or green gas out of the 13 million tons of sugar beet pulp that are produced in Europe each year. The project has 7 partners, Wageningen University being one of them and is managed by Royal Cosun. It has a total budget of €11.5 million with €6.6 million coming from the BBI JU. They claim that “The project will demonstrate an integrated and cost-effective cascading bio-refinery system to refine sugar beet pulp and identify applications for approximately 65% of its mass in high value markets, increasing its current value by as much as 20-50 times.” By using multiple extraction techniques, they intend to isolate micro-cellulose fibers, arabinose and galacturonic acid.
Another flagship is FIRST2RUN. It has a budget of €8 million from industry plus €17 million from BBI, has 6 partners from 4 different countries and is just half way through its 4 years run. It involves the cultivation of cardoon (up to 3500 ha) on arid land. In addition to just producing biomass cardoon is expected to yield azelaic and pelargonic acid.