EventNov 11, 2021

2021 Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference (ABLC) in San Francisco, CA

The 2021 Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference (ABLC) took place in San Francisco October 27th – 29th, 2021 with dozens of speakers and over 400 attendees from across the globe. ABLC is one of the largest networking events and acts as a series of several conferences and events that come together to address the current major issues within the bioeconomy.

Jordan Solomon, President/CEO of Ecostrat and Chairman of the BDO Zone Initiative, spoke in the Sustainable Futures panel and expressed the importance of biobased infrastructure development in underserved communities and how this can help achieve scale and create a sustainable future.

Below, Jordan presents on the Bioeconomy Development Opportunity (BDO) Zone Initiative: Accelerating bio-based investment and infrastructure development in economically distressed areas:

KEY SPEAKER REMARKS:

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

“Mitigating feedstock risk means creating a sustainable future. A sustainable future has a lot of components to it, but one of the most important things is scale. Functionally, it means getting more plants built around this country, faster”.
“It’s important that we move these plants to places where (a) they are most likely to succeed and (b) where the jobs that they create have the greatest impact on the economy”.
“Feedstock risk is the theme of this conference because if we solve for feedstock risk, we solve for scale. Solving for feedstock risk is one of the pressing questions of the moment”.
“Project developers spend an inordinate amount of time and treasure looking for the best places in the country from a feedstock perspective to site their next plants. But, what if they didn’t have to do that? What if those places were already found for them?”.
“Imagine if there was a credit-rating system available that investors and developers could rely on to locate the lowest-risk areas in the country to develop new plants. Imagine that in addition to low-risk biomass that is located in those areas, those areas had access to billions of dollars of existing federal credits”.
“They solve a really big problem for distressed communities: they don’t have credibility. Lots of [communities] have tremendous bio-based assets. Lots of them are great places to build a biobased plant because they have the infrastructure. What they don’t have is the credibility, the platform, and often times they don’t have the budget to raise the flag on themselves as some of the best places in the country for the next biobased plant”.
“It’s clear that the market can’t act on information it doesn’t have, so BDO Zones change that. They carry out rigorous due diligence using a standardized framework to validate feedstock surplus, committed anchor suppliers on the ground, and sound infrastructure. ‘AA’ and ‘A’ ratings identify the best areas in the country for biobased development”.

To learn more about the Standards for Biomass Supply Chain Risk, visit https://ecostrat.com/standards/

Get a BDO Zone Rating

Originally published at ecostrat.com.