ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY
project is either deemed ‘investment ready’ or
impracticable. Feasibility has supported four
projects to make that next leap into the bioenergy
unknown. The first business to take up feasibility
funding was Blue Lake Milling, an oat processing
facility in Bordertown South Australia who scoped
an anaerobic digestion system for oat husks. With
a favourable feasibility study, they are continuing
to develop and seek approvals to pursue this
development opportunity.
While feasibility funding has enabled the next step
for some businesses, what the Bioenergy Connect
Program has more strongly revealed is that scale
can be a real issue in project viability. While many
businesses have the motivation and commitment
to producing energy through biomass, they don’t
have the scale to achieve a return on investment
that makes the project attractive. This along with
the recognition that much of the current biomass
present in the region could have higher value
through its end product rather than the energy
created was a key realisation.
As a result of the Bioenergy Roadmap Project,
Regional Development Australia Limestone Coast
saw the opportunity to bring together businesses
that had a biomass potential or had gone through
the prefeasibility process with industry experts, to
flesh out the opportunity that lay with hosting a bio
hub for the region. A regional forum was held in
Mount Gambier in December 2018 to outline this
potential. With over 60 attendees from across the
region and some from across the border, speakers
from The University of Adelaide, Bioenergy
Australia, Department of Energy and Mining and
Renewed Carbon spoke to the opportunities around
biomass, bioenergy, the bio economy and bio hubs.
The bioeconomy is a sustainable economic system
based on the use of renewable raw materials and
bio-based innovations. Bioeconomy projects can
create growth, prosperity and employment but does
so on a renewable resource base. Regions have a
significant competitive advantage in the bioeconomy
space, an advantage not yet being truly realised.
Biomass at scale occurs in regions so they are best
placed to pursue these opportunities as opposed
to our metropolitan counterparts and turn them into
economic development projects.
While it remains financially viable for some larger
businesses to pursue opportunities in their own
right, many of the forum participants saw that the
true opportunity to enter the bioeconomy sits with
a regional approach. Expanding in scale from
an individual business to region wide creates a
significantly greater opportunity and would bring
together large volumes and types of biomass
enabling a bio hub to sustainably supply markets
and achieve volumes to reach global markets,
opportunities that are problematic at a smaller
scale. Regional bio hubs can also combine
existing commercial opportunities with research
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