The jobless recovery, biofuels, eency-weency balance sheets, and you

Worried about the jobless recovery? Or how to build 600 biorefineries to meet US renewable fuel targets by 2022? Don’t feel alone. But here’s something you can do.

In Washington, President Obama launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership – ho-hum, you say, and I think I hear you yawning.

But get a cup of coffee, and read on. This item is important.

Why is the President focused on innovation and competitiveness? It means jobs, but of a special kind. High technology workers on average earn 50 to 100% more than the average of workers in all other fields, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

But more than than – he’s addressing the “jobless recovery” that has been experienced in the US in the aftermath of the 2007-09 global financial crisis. Leaders are worried about it. There are only so many McDonald’s and Wal-Mart jobs that the community can add, if the value-add manufacturing base is not in place. “Invent here, make elsewhere” is a failed industrial policy, according to a PCAST report, “Ensuring Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing,” released this week, and downloadable here.

But what about you? If you are building, thinking of building, or helping someone to build – one of those 600 new, advanced biofuels facilities that will be required to meet the 2022 Renewable Fuel Standard – this means spurring investment in…you.

Government can’t get anything done, I hear you say. Well, they sure as shootin’ aren’t going to get this done alone. You have some shoveling to do, too. Let’s look at that.

Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Biofuels and You

If there another industry proposing to build 600 high-tech manufacturing sites in the US over the next 11 years, we’d sure like to know about it. And no one is trying to build more capacity off eency-weency balance sheets than the US biorefinery industry.

So, you have more at stake, and more to gain, from this initiative, than any other single US industry.

So, let’s get behind it.

The Victory Plant

Our goal: to launch a collaborative industry dialogue, and a Biofuels Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, that will set companion goals for advanced manufacturing in biofuels in April 2012, at the Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference, to dramatically reduce the investment, timelines, and risk for building advanced bioenergy projects – both in the US and around the globe.

The biofuels industry should set a goal of cutting in half, by 2022, the time necessary to plan, finance, build, and commission an advanced bioenergy plant, from 36 months to 18 months.

Let’s call it The Victory Plant. Low-cost, low-risk, high-speed manufacturing will spur stakeholders to meet the Renewable Fuel Standard targets, and reduce the capital and operational cost of these projects.

That’s victory over a jobless recovery, victory over energy dependence, victory over carbon, and victory over a failed dialogue on food-vs-fuel that can be resolved by advanced biofuels.

We can’t disagree our way out of these problems. Or complain, scold, shame, or squat our way out.

But we can hire and manufacture our way forward. Let’s do that.

In the Second World War, 20 million victory gardens were planted, according to the USDA. By 1945, half of the US fruit and vegetables harvest (as much as 10 million tons) came from home and community plots was estimated to be 9-10 million tons. In the early 1941, the average Liberty Ship was built in 230 days. By 1943, the average dropped to 42 days, and three ships were completed each day.

The Digest will add speakers, content, and collaborative discussion on Advanced Manufacturing Leadership and Innovation at the Advanced Biofuels Markets conference (we will be announcing complete details on the full program next week), and companion talks at the Biofuels Canada conference October 3-4 in Calgary.

I’ll be delighted to hear from you (contact me here) – industry leaders at the verge of scale-up, government, or academia — if you would like to take a leading role in shaping this effort.

More on AMP

The AMP will provide the platform for similar breakthroughs in the next decade, by building a roadmap for advanced manufacturing technologies, speeding ideas from the drawing board to the manufacturing floor, scaling-up first-of-a-kind technologies, and developing the infrastructure and shared facilities to allow small and mid-sized manufacturers to innovate and compete.

The initiative is based on a report titled “Ensuring Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing” from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which you can download here.

Of the 36 stakeholders that lent time to the report’s development, you see six investors in advanced bio-based projects: Proctor & Gamble, Boeing, Lockheed, DARPA, Synthetic Genomics, and Blue Marble Energy.

Some AMP highlights

The Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce and other agencies will coordinate a government-wide effort to leverage their existing funds and future budgets, with an initial goal of $300 million, to co-invest with industry in innovative technologies that will jumpstart domestic manufacturing capability. Initial investments include small high-powered batteries, advanced composites, metal fabrication, bio-manufacturing, and alternative energy, among others.

A Materials Genome Initiative, would invest more than $100M in research, training and infrastructure to deploy advanced materials at twice the speed than is possible today, at a fraction of the cost.

Plus:

DARPA will explore new approaches that have potential to dramatically reduce – by up to a factor of 5 – the time required to design, build, and test manufactured goods while enabling entrepreneurs to meet Defense Department needs.

MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Stanford, Berkeley, and Michigan will form a multi-university effort to share best practices relating to advanced manufacturing and its linkage to innovation. The universities, industry and government agencies will define research opportunities and identify key technology priorities.

Commerce Department will develop an advanced manufacturing technology consortium, starting with $12 million in FY12, to identify public private partnerships to tackle common technological barriers to the development of new products.

The PCAST report that spurred all of this

PCAST called for:

Incentives for clean energy manufacturing innovation and investment, including the expansion  of the Clean Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit from $2.3 billion to $5 billion, with the goal of incentivizing $11.7 billion in private sector investment in clean energy manufacturing projects, firms, and jobs. The current tax credit program has been oversubscribed, and has had proven successful in leveraging private sector investment and creating jobs.

Creation of a public private partnership program to support platform technologies that will support innovation in manufacturing. The budget calls for $12 million in 2012 to fund these partnerships via the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia (AMTech) program, and for $75 million to be dedicated to PPPs via the Technology Innovation Program (TIP), in particular for technologies that could improve manufacturing processes.

Allocation to NIST laboratories of $760 million to support development of measurements and technological advances in areas including nano manufacturing, network security, and bio manufacturing, with increases of $120 million directly for advanced manufacturing.

Allocation to DOE of $500 million to support energy related advanced manufacturing technologies, such as flexible electronics and ultra light, ultra durable automotive materials.