Business Model for Bio-hubs in Canada and Australia
The International Energy Agency (IEA) Bioenergy Technology Collaboration Programme, under Task 43 (Sustainable Biomass Supply Integration for Bioenergy within the Broader Bioeconomy), aims to identify strategies to improve supply chain efficiencies of sustainably sourced biomass.
In the previous triennium, IEA Bioenergy Task 43 implemented two SWOT analyses on comparing biomass supply via bio-hubs against the alternative, through workshops held in Europe (October 2019, Sopron, Hungary) and North America (March 2020, Ottawa, Canada). These workshops collected insights from 55 participants across 17 countries. The workshop in Europe was co-hosted by the BioEast Initiative, a platform fostering bioeconomy collaboration among 11 Central and Eastern European countries (Kulisic et al., 2019). Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) implemented the workshop in Canada (Nasso et al., 2020). These workshops examined in-depth the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with biomass supply via bio-hubs against the existing alternative. Both workshops outlined a list of possible actions to enable and/or strengthen bio-hub implementation in the real environment.
Subsequently, a follow-up initiative, supported by the Canadian national research fund continued to investigate bio-hubs further by engaging the focus groups in exploring the feasibility of bio-hubs in Canada. Early indications suggest a lack of clarity in the business rationale for bio-hubs in Canada, thereby limiting industry interest. The proposed research aims to present diverse business models to stakeholders to ascertain the prerequisites for their active involvement.