Episode 56 - Khaki is the New Green and Resilience is the New Carbon with Jim Lane

In our first recorded abroad episode for 2026, I had the opportunity earlier this month to catch up in person with Jim Lane in Digestville, located in Key Biscayne, Florida. I hope that many of you recall that we catch up with Jim intermittently and since our last chat with him in November 2024, much has changed in the world of the biobased economy, and yet many themes remain the same!

We firstly reflected on some major trends that are emerging, echoed in the title of this podcast. Jim observed how important the biobased economy is becoming in the corporate and national conversations around resilience, and that security and defence interests are also rising in the new products and distributed manufacturing pathways that biotechnologies and biobased products could provide.

Given the current discussions in Australia around First Of A Kind (FOAK) manufacturing facilities, I was very keen to explore Jim's recent writings on this matter. We explored how government and industry play roles in the establishment of FOAK and Jim noted that how this is done is critical to ensuring that there aren't complications arising with SOAK (which I shall leave you all to interpret – or listen to the podcast). Jim also reflected on another concept closely associated with FOAK which is the establishment of normalcy, or persistence of the arising products. This gave me cause to reflect on the recent, and some might say ongoing, alt-meat market which grew, peaked and troughed and now regaining its feet, and how normalcy may have played a role in this sectors trip through the Dunning Kruger effect. The conversation then moved to FOAK and fuels (while alert to being mispronounced) and the importance of feedstock, revisiting our 'Sara Lee' feedstocks acronym from our conversation in November 2024. Sustainable, Affordable, Reliable, Available, Low carbon Extractable and Efficient feedstocks.

We touched on the cost of feedstock as a percentage of variable cost and the need to demonstrate that it can be reliably accessed, and then Jim laid out quite a challenge from a SAF contracting perspective. In essence, the challenge is how to compete with the abundance of fossil feedstock and create renewable scale that meets market demand. To that end, Jim favours forestry as a preferred feedstock, with its well understood supply chains and production systems, but he also noted the need for oxygen removal from biocrude and price at the refinery gate to be near fossil prices. I suggested that in an ideal world, with unlimited fats, oils and greases, we would favour the HEFA pathway. We then reflected on the Alcohol-To-Jet (ATJ) pathway, touching back on the FOAK challenge. Discussing the importance of technology guarantees and how to manage this in the absence of a balance sheet, I raised the example of the DuPont 1,3 PDO Sorona technology, launched some 15 years back and a journey we discussed with Ray Miller in Episode 3. Jim noted that integration and dependencies need to last a long time, and industry stability as a factor, alongside policy stability.

Turning back to chemicals, Jim shared the view that flatter supply chains are more likely to adopt biobased or novel chemistry. Jim very kindly reflected on the 'complexity law' that I have floated for the past few years and contended that these flatter supply chain successes bore this rule of thumb out. Reflecting on biopolymers, we observed that the sustainability benefits are typically much smaller than operational benefits—sustainability can be strong but hard to operationalise.

We close out our conversation with a little soothsaying, and while uncertainty will likely dominate the coming year the biobased economy needs corporate strength, not technology strength while working on a stronger positioning that reframes price, value and consequence. Jim's final metaphor of the leaf on the ocean seemed very apt given the focus on biobased economy.