How the plan marks a sea change in US green policymaking
On September 12, Joe Biden signed an executive order to inject $2 billion into the US bioeconomy.
The National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative bids to bolster US capacity in high-value high-tech goods made from biological resources, such as alternative proteins, pharmaceutical biotech, and sustainable farming inputs.
The plan details pathways for research, development, and scaling in bio-based technologies that serve the energy, health, commerce, defence, and agricultural sectors.
Already, the announcement has had ripple effects through the international bioeconomy community. Korean Investors are diving into discussions over new US production facilities. Meanwhile, Chinese biotech stocks fell in response to the news. Hong Kong-based Wuxi biologics’ shares declined 20 percent the day after the order was announced.
We explain what makes the plan so significant, starting with an overview of its contents.
What’s inside the plan
The NBBI initiative is made up of 11 components. Top of the list is federal investment into foundational R&D in bioengineering and biomanufacturing.
However, the plan goes beyond innovation. It also aims to expand existing domestic biomanufacturing capacity as well as prototype projects to “accelerate the translation of basic research results into practice”
In a sign of its commitment to building viable industries and markets, NBBI further seeks to implement economic mechanisms that favour bio-based solutions and goods. It references “climate smart” incentives for farmers and landowners to improve sustainability and seeks to “expand market opportunities for bioenergy and biobased products and services”.
Responsibility for stimulating bio-based production will fall to various government departments. The Department of Defence for example will ‘incentivize’ the expansion of domestic industrial biomanufacturing for materials and products for the military supply chain through a $270 million investment.
The DoD is particularly interested in bio-based fuels, bio-based fire-resistant composites, polymers and resins, and protective materials. The US military has already started exploring bio-based products, with the US Navy teaming up with Cambium to test fire-resistant biocomposites for naval aircraft in 2020.
The Department of Energy has earmarked $178 million to support biorefineries in research and commercialisation for renewable chemicals and fuels, while the Department of Health and Human Services will invest $40 million to expand biomanufacturing for pharmaceutical ingredients, antibiotics, and starting materials.
Specific volume targets await agency assessment reports due over the coming year.
Another target of the plan is to create robust infrastructures and institutions for scaling, a commitment evidenced by the close involvement of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the US standards agency attached to the Department of Commerce.
In a $14 million programme, the NIST will generate new measurements and standards for emerging bio-industries as well as data tools and protocols for assessing the sector’s impacts in healthcare, climate and sustainability, food and agriculture, and supply chain resilience. It will also create a “data ecosystem” for information sharing among entrepreneurs and researchers in the space.
Another NIST task is to standardise the industry lexicon. Although stabilising key terms and their usage may seem a marginal concern, definitions are crucial for building viable markets. A shared vocabulary for the bioeconomy will allow diverse industry stakeholders to dialogue in consistent ways about the developing sector, achieve precision in legal documentation, and to evaluate economic performance.
The NIST’s work will be in conjunction with the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals, the Bioindustries Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem, and BioFabUSA. The institution will also lead consortia to bring together academia, industry, and government over the challenge of standardisation.
What will happen next ?
The plan’s first milestone will come in December 2022, when the heads of each government agency involved will submit calculations on current biotech and biomanufacturing spending in their sectors. These figures will be used to refine the plan’s implementation and budgeting.
These December follow-up reports will also identify opportunities for public-private partnerships essential for moving innovations from research institutions onto the market.
Around December time too, government procurement officers will identify the value and number of existing bio-based product contracts. The aim here is to track and ultimately increase biobased purchasing between now and 2025.
Government procurement staff will also be responsible for giving rolling feedback on the supply and performance of biobased products, information that will be published by the Secretary of Agriculture each year.
By March 2023, the health, energy, agriculture, and commerce departments plus the National Science Foundation will submit reports on how their sectors could benefit from specific biotech and biomanufacturing solutions, as well as on necessary information security measures.
The Significance of the Bioeconomy Plan
The NBBI’s $2 billion budget appears modest next to other similar US federal programmes, such as the inflation reduction act of earlier this year or the 2021 $11 billion pandemic support package for agricultural producers.
Nonetheless, from a per capita perspective, the NBBI’s budget is comparable to the EU’s Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking, which dispensed around $4 billion to bioeconomy projects between 2017 and 2020.
At the same time, the NBBI’s significance lies in more than the dollar amount it has committed. Its first standout feature is the range of sectors covered. Beneficiaries run the whole gamut of industries that deal in biological resources in one way or another – from biopharma to farming.
It is also notable for enlisting diverse federal agencies to coordinate implementation. In its own words, the plan is a “a whole-of-government approach to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing towards innovative solutions in health, climate change, energy, food security, agriculture, supply chain resilience, and national and economic security.”
Its emphasis on federal coordination marks out the NBBI from EU bioeconomy packages. While the EU and US are both federal systems, the US government holds greater powers over the fiscal, defence, and health policy, giving greater leverage to support scaling in the bioeconomy.
The second important feature of the NBBI is its focus on coordinated scaling. While bioeconomy initiatives typically focus on pumping funds into R&D, the NBBI’s provisions also aim to flesh out the infrastructure and norms necessary for national scale-up.
A key actor in this will be the NIST, which is set to convene public-private partnerships to agree over terms, measures, and standards to improve cross-sector communication and economic monitoring.
Another prerequisite for scaling will be procuring enough biomass for industry. To this end, the Department of Energy, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture will source “the estimated 1 billion tons of sustainable bioimass and waste resources in the United States to provide domestic supply chains for fuels, chemicals, and materials”.
The cross-agency, multi-sector character of the NBBI gestures towards the third and perhaps most important hallmark of the Biden bioeconomy plan, which is that it explicitly unites climate, national security, and economic security under a single policy package.
The White House summit on the plan held two days after the signing was attended by the US National Security Advisor alongside the directors and secretaries of health, energy, agriculture, and technology.
The NBBI forwards a vision of governance that sees a direct link between economic security, climate, and national security. In this respect, it tracks other recent moves by the US that suggest closer mergers between the green transition and natural resource security goals. The Mineral Security Partnership announced June 2022 is another example of this. Through the partnership, the Biden administration is set to forge alliances with countries abundant in the minerals needed in lower-carbon tech and infrastructure.
The NBBI is also alive to national security concerns, making sustained references to measures against industrial espionage. US self-sufficiency and global competitiveness in bio-based goods, it notes, depend on measures against “digital intrusion, manipulation, and exfiltration efforts by foreign adversaries”. The defence agencies and the Secretary of Homeland Security will contribute towards formulating cybersecurity measures around bio-resources databases and industrial processes.
This signals how geopolitics looms large in Biden’s new commitment to the bioeconomy. Fears around Chinese industrial espionage have wrecked US security agencies over recent years, as evidenced in a 2020 Washington talk by FBI director Christopher Wray: “China has grown its economy rapidly by combining low-cost Chinese labor with Western capital and technology. But …to surpass America, they need to make leaps in cutting-edge technologies…China is acquiring American property and innovation, by any means necessary”.
Wray here expresses the views of the intelligence community at large. Yet in terms of planning and infrastructure, the US is playing catch up with China on bioeconomy policy. China is already a formidable player in this field owing to consistent government backing for biofuels and circular infrastructures over the last decade, particularly in rural areas and within the agricultural sector.
China’s longstanding bio-ambitions were concretised in its last five-year economic plan – the first in the country’s history to be devoted to the bioeconomy. Although China is still largely reliant on western expertise and technology transfers, the innovation gap does not look set to last for long.
In this context, NBBI’s goal of sustainable self-sufficiency in bio-based goods appears to be as much a response to China’s biomanufacturing prowess as being a pillar of the green transition.
Sustainability as security
The comprehensiveness of the bioeconomy package and its emphasis on national self-sufficiency heralds a turning point in the US green transition.
Before, a support package for organic fertiliser and plant-based materials may have been siloed into environmental policy, with crossovers into agriculture. Now, federal policymakers are treating the bioeconomy as a lynchpin of more conventional government policy objectives: national security, geopolitical prowess, global competitiveness, and economic growth.
From now on, it will become far easier to frame sustainable production policies as an essential component in US national security and economic governance. Perhaps the only precedent for this is the Inflation Reduction Act of earlier this year, which embedded decarbonisation into a federal economic programme. Under the guise of a macroeconomic plan for stemming inflation, the Biden administration passed a suite of measures for boosting the green energy sector and reducing US carbon emissions.
It appears that in the US, the environmental imperative to draw away from a globalised fossil fuel complex, amplified by ongoing geopolitical fissures, has dovetailed with priorities around economic competitiveness with China. These factors have stimulated a green growth programme centred around domestic industrial capacity building.
In this respect, it follows a wider policy trend as state governments around the world come to terms with the macroeconomic lessons of 2020-2022. There has been surging interest in fostering supply chain resilience through regional production and distribution networks after the Covid and the war in Ukraine brought home the risks of relying on global logistics for essential goods.
