The Tweenager: 19 years of Biofuels Digest

Nineteen is an odd birthday. You’re not really a kid anymore, but you’re still a teenager. You’re old enough to vote, to sign contracts, to serve in the military, and old enough that people begin expecting you to shoulder genuine responsibilities, yet everyone—including yourself—knows you’re still growing into them. Biofuels Digest turns nineteen today, and as I found myself leafing back through old editions, it struck me that the bioeconomy has reached much the same age. It has stopped asking childhood questions and begun wrestling with adult ones.

I found myself back, in memory, on September 25, 2008, leaning over the rail of the press risers on the right-hand side of the ballroom at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, trying to catch a glimpse of Sarah Palin as television cameras pivoted almost mechanically toward her every movement. A hundred feet away John McCain stood at the podium explaining why he had suspended his presidential campaign and returned to Washington, while Barack Obama, appearing only by satellite, towered above him on enormous projection screens, so large that it recalled Apple’s famous 1984advertisement, where the projected image somehow made the man physically present appear the smaller of the two. Outside the ballroom Manhattan seemed to be holding its breath. Lehman Brothers had failed only ten days earlier, Wall Street was tumbling by the hour, Congress was struggling toward what would become TARP, and everywhere there was the unmistakable sensation that history had suddenly accelerated, although no one yet knew precisely where it was headed. McCain spoke once again of an “all of the above” energy strategy that included renewable fuels; Obama, who had sponsored Renewable Fuel Standard legislation in the Senate, represented a different path to much the same conclusion—that renewable energy had become part of the national conversation.

Yet what has stayed with me over all these years wasn’t the stage. It was the exhibit hall. Michael Douglas wandered quietly from booth to booth without handlers urging him onward or photographers choreographing every stop. He would pause, shake hands, look someone squarely in the eye and ask, almost invariably, the same two questions. “What do you do?” And then, “How does it change things?” There was nothing performative about it. He seemed genuinely curious. Looking back now, I realize that history always moves at two distinct speeds. One unfolds beneath television lights, campaign speeches and collapsing markets. The other begins much more quietly, when somebody asks the right question of somebody building something that may not matter very much today, but might matter enormously twenty years from now.

That evening I returned to my hotel room and finished editing another issue of Biofuels Digest. Reading it again this week, I was struck not by how much we have learned, nor even by how much the technologies have advanced, but by how completely the questions themselves have changed. Those pages were filled with stories about corn ethanol, biodiesel, blend walls, commodity spikes, Renewable Fuel Standard implementation, and the brave first generation of commercial demonstration plants. We were trying to answer one overwhelming question: could renewable fuels earn a place inside the existing energy system? It was exactly the right question for 2008, because at that moment the industry was still trying to persuade the world that it belonged.

Reading Meghan Sapp’s Digest tonight, I realized that we rarely ask that question anymore. Spain’s railways are no longer debating whether renewable diesel works; Canada is no longer debating whether renewable fuels can be integrated; pipeline operators are no longer debating whether biomethane burns; developers in India are no longer debating whether electrolyzers produce hydrogen; Britain’s policymakers are no longer debating whether Sustainable Aviation Fuel can power an aircraft. The debate has moved on. Almost imperceptibly, the industry has stopped asking whether renewable systems deserve a seat at the table and has begun asking whether they are ready to become the table itself.

For years I’ve joked that working in the bioeconomy sometimes feels like trying to swim across Peanut Butter Lake. Every year projects seem to move a little more slowly, every financing requires another layer of diligence, another lender, another regulator, another certification, another engineering review, another supply agreement. Like most jokes, it concealed a genuine frustration, and for a long time I assumed the peanut butter itself had somehow become thicker. Looking across tonight’s stories, however, it occurred to me that perhaps I had been blaming the lake for what was really happening to the swimmer.

Or perhaps, more accurately, to the elephant.

A baby elephant can be led down a dirt road with a length of rope. A mature bull elephant requires reinforced transport trailers, heavy cranes, bridge inspections, route surveys, police escorts and engineers worrying about stresses no one notices when moving a calf. The apparent complexity is not bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. It is simply the hidden physics of scale revealing themselves.

That, I think, is what tonight’s Digest is really about.

Renfe’s renewable diesel locomotives are not attempting to prove that hydrotreated vegetable oil burns in a diesel engine; we’ve known that chemistry for years. What matters now is whether a national railway can depend upon that chemistry every day, across thousands of miles of track, hundreds of locomotives, maintenance schedules measured in decades and operating crews measured in generations. Scale has quietly transformed combustion into systems engineering.

The Canadian multi-energy hubs tell much the same story. Twenty years ago a successful project produced one product. Today the ambition is to integrate renewable diesel, renewable natural gas and Sustainable Aviation Fuel into a single commercial organism where feedstocks, engineering, financing, offtake agreements and operations all have to mature together or the entire enterprise stumbles. The elephant has grown.

Gasunie isn’t asking whether biomethane can flow through a pipe. It is asking whether an entire national transmission network can carry renewable molecules with the same reliability as conventional natural gas, because at continental scale infrastructure ceases to be merely the container for technology and becomes part of the technology itself.

The same pattern repeats itself in India’s commercial electrolyzer demonstrations, in Toronto’s expansion of anaerobic digestion infrastructure, and in Britain’s decision to expand export finance for Sustainable Aviation Fuel. The science remains important, but the center of gravity has shifted. Repeatability matters more than novelty. Infrastructure matters as much as invention. Project finance has ceased to sit beside the engineering; increasingly, it is part of the engineering.

Looking back, perhaps this transition was inevitable. Railroads eventually stopped being about steam locomotives and became about timetables. Commercial aviation stopped being about wings and became about airports. The Internet stopped being about websites and became about cloud infrastructure. Every successful technology eventually reaches the point where the invention itself fades into the background and the surrounding system becomes the real story.

Seventeen years ago, in Citizen Cane, I wrote that “the destination is clear, but the way is spackled with unmarked shoals, and sandbars, and reefs.” At the time I believed I was writing about uncertainty. Reading those words again today, I think I was really writing about scale. Uncertainty has not disappeared over the last nineteen years; it has simply migrated. Scientific uncertainty has given way, little by little, to commercial uncertainty. The questions that dominate boardrooms today are not whether a catalyst works or whether a microorganism performs, but whether infrastructure can interconnect, whether counterparties can perform over twenty years, whether financing can close on acceptable terms, whether certification systems can synchronize across jurisdictions, and whether dozens of independent organizations can behave, for a generation or more, as though they were one.

Those are not signs that the bioeconomy has become bogged down. They are signs that it has grown up.

Nineteen is an awkward birthday. It is the age at which responsibility begins to outweigh promise, when the world becomes less interested in what you might accomplish and more interested in whether you can carry the weight that comes with accomplishment. As I looked back across nineteen years of the Digest, it occurred to me that perhaps the industry has arrived at exactly that moment. The questions have become harder not because Peanut Butter Lake has grown thicker, but because the elephant has grown—and that is precisely the kind of problem worth having.