Business View Oceania | March 2020

63 64 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA MARCH 2020 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA MARCH 2020 projects that contribute to business resilience and regional economic benefits. Business View Oceania discussed the intriguing facets of the bioenergy industry with Brian Cox, Executive Officer of the Bioenergy Association and asked for his insights into the bioenergy renewables landscape of the future. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. BVO: How would you describe the overall makeup of the Association? Cox: “Our formal name is Bioenergy Association of New Zealand but our operations are in New Zealand, Australia and the South Pacific. Our membership covers academics, equipment suppliers and practitioners in the field in terms of the whole value chain and policy makers. And we have a very close association with government agencies. The Association membership is not large; only about 110 members. But we have 2,300 followers. The ethic about that is that there are not a lot of players in the market here and many of them are very small. But there are a lot of people who are interested (I call them followers) and will be looking at how they use bioenergy solutions in their business. If they’re an academic or in terms of policy it’s not their full-time job so membership is not something for them but they are keen to have information on the market. New Zealand and Australia operates basically as a single market, in terms of standards and a range of different things. A lot of companies have an office in Sydney, which covers Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. Many of these young companies will be working more effectively in Australia because it’s a bigger market, so we just treat that as a single market across the board. “The Association is split into three parts. We have a single association covering the gaseous, the liquid and the solid biofuels. There’s wood energy (principally in heat), there’s the processing of waste to make biogas and biofertilizer (used in electricity and heat or transport fuel), there’s liquid (a transport biofuel) and there are great overlaps between each of those three areas. But for operational reasons, most people working in one are not necessarily within the other, even though there’s an overlap in terms of outcomes. So, the advantage of having a single organisation with three parts is that we get the linkages between them. We have an Association website and three unbranded topical websites that are portals to information. We operate that way and it’s up to me to bring it into balance and support each one.” BVO: Is one of those industry sectors more prevalent? Cox: “In the last two years, there’s been quite a transformation. Up until then, it was mainly heat from wood fuels. No one was interested in using waste to make energy. It was the real poor cousin; the practitioners were constantly frustrated. Today, I will get more people attend a waste-to-energy activity than I would a process heat activity because process heat is fairly well established and access to information and demonstration is easily done by people themselves. Whereas with waste-to-energy, people are seeking information more. The transport biofuel sector is a top priority for our government but there has been no support for it. And yet nearly 60 percent of our fossil fuel use still comes from transport. So the government is changing that but the sources for biomass, for liquid biofuels, is principally from the wood products. “We’re an unsubsidised market, so unlike the U.S. where the driver has been for farmers to grow soybeans and other crops which could be used as a feedstock, we are not in that situation. Here, the farmers have control over whether they’re going to do cattle or crops, according to their perception of the market. A landowner might be in forestry, see that market dropping and the market for milk increasing and booming, so they can pull the trees out and move to dairy. They don’t need permits provided they meet B IOENERGY ASSOC I AT ION