1.2.1 Visions of the Future as a Basis for the Problematisation of Economic Activities

The transition to a sustainable bioeconomy aims to develop an economy that is no longer based on the use of oil but on the use of renewable resources that must respect planetary limits (cf. Chapter 2). This dynamic brings into play visions of the future. That is, the opportunity for a transition to the bioeconomy relies on the need for actors to share common representations (Beckert Reference Beckert2013, Reference Beckert2016; Borup et al. Reference Borup, Brown, Konrad and van Lente2006).

These shared representations have the function of accompanying the actors in their activities that are subject to very high uncertainty. This uncertainty is linked to the instability related to production, demand, and the ability to access the natural resources necessary for production. To counter these uncertainties, actors translate their visions of the future into narratives. These narratives are then expressed in speeches, projects, etc.

From this point of view, the transition to the bioeconomy is being played out today under the influence of the futures that the actors represent (Giurca et al. Reference Giurca, Befort and Taylor2022). In doing so, actors act ‘as if’ this future were true and build their innovation strategies in this direction. Actors are then strongly invested in the definition and propagation of these visions of the future, which may be contradictory. Thus, the actors proceed with backcasting exercises. Unlike the scenario method, which starts from the present to identify futures, backcasting starts from a vision of the future to identify the transition path to be followed and the technical and economic obstacles to be overcome (Sanders et al. Reference Sanders, Langevald, Kuikman, Meeusen and Meijer2010).

1.2.2 The Role of Innovation Commons

Innovations have a role to play in the transition to the bioeconomy because the aim is to use new raw materials and develop new processes, new products, new outlets, or new forms of organisation. These innovations can aim to replace existing products (e.g. biodegradable plastics aim to replace single-use plastics) or to fulfil new functions (e.g. because of its lightness and strength, hemp can be used to produce high-speed train bodies).

We often think that innovations are the result of an individual process driven by a particularly inspired entrepreneur. However, in order to emerge, all innovation projects rely on the production of common knowledge that the actors share. These particular forms of innovation are called innovation commons (Potts Reference Potts2018).

These common resources appear when actors seek to solve a common problem (here, how to industrialise the production of bio-based products). Thus, this governance tool allows actors to give themselves a common vision and to co-ordinate their activities. To do so, the actors share not only technologies and demonstrative objects but also information guiding the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities. This collective action makes it possible to defend innovations under development from the pressures of established actors. Nevertheless, these commons are bound to disappear in the future.

1.4.1 Chemurgy as a Social Movement for the Use of Renewable Resources

When it emerged in the 1920s, chemurgy brought together very contrasting characters. G. W. Carver, son of a black slave with an uncertain birth date, sought from the 1890s to develop new agricultural production and their valorisation in order to lift the black farmers of the ‘Deep South’ out of its endemic poverty. Although he was excluded from federal research grants because of the racism of Alabama’s laws, this did not prevent him from finding more than a hundred non-food applications for soybeans and peanuts, from seeking to valorise all waste products on the farm, from finding other ways than those of pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and from protecting soils from erosion and monoproduction. Carver’s pre-World War I ‘creative chemistry’ (Abrams & Adair Reference Abrams and Adair2009) is dreamlike in its proximity to the uses expected today: the use of food co-products for the manufacture of insulating panels, paints, dyes, industrial alcohol, various types of plastic, carpets, mats and fabrics, oils, gums and waxes, etc. He became famous at the end of World War I by proposing a process for producing rubber from sweet potatoes.

In the mid-1920s, an unexpected actor emerged: the railroad companies. Stricken by the post–World War I crises of overproduction, they sought to plan a regional development likely to bring them business, based on the presence of an agro-industry ‘on the farm’ (Finlay Reference Finlay1997). The unlikely meeting between the agro-ecologist son of a slave and Henry Ford is probably because the latter was seeking to circumvent the steel cartel by producing his car bodies and some of his car parts from renewable resources. He dreamt of vertically integrating all the raw materials, processes, and components necessary for his automobile production:

The Great Depression, if it strengthened the interest in chemurgy, was above all a moment of conflict between the isolationists and agrarians and the Roosevelt presidency because the former claimed that the ‘free’ development of chemurgy was a sufficient alternative to the interventionist measures of the New Deal; nevertheless, they ended up accepting the creation by Roosevelt in 1938 of four regional laboratories of the US Department of Agriculture dedicated to chemurgy. Thus, the emergence of chemurgy took shape through the conjunction of three phenomena: (i) the growing interest in a new industrialisation of chemistry (Galambos et al. Reference Galambos, Hikino and Zamagni2007), (ii) the existence of agricultural production surpluses, and (iii) a political debate between isolationists and agrarians.

1.4.2 Promises of Chemurgy and the Constitution of Networks of Actors

The end of chemurgy can be explained by the cessation of large-scale projects, the victory of oil over the use of renewable resources, and the opposition to chemurgy by leaders of the American agricultural world, who favoured specialisation in commodity agricultural products rather than a strategy of diversification towards non-food biomass (Finlay Reference Finlay2003). However, two elements must be kept in mind to understand the contemporary dynamics.

On the one hand, the formation of a specific meso-economic space is a meeting place for heterogeneous actors around technical objects. Within this space, actors set up reflections on all the knowledge to be produced, the resources to be assembled, and the political alliances to be built to support the industrial effort. Through reality checks, they seek to make stable a particular regime of knowledge production and economic activities.

On the other hand, the technical and economic promises required the production of demonstrative objects to support the development stories. The various products proposed by Carver (often with little commercial success but always well publicised to the point that we find traces of them in major films of the time), or at Ford the prototype cars with bodies made of thermosetting plastics from renewables, fulfil this function. It is therefore interesting to focus on these promises by projecting them onto the current situation (see Table 1.1).

1.5.1 Three Observations at the Origin of the Reflection on the Development of Bioindustries

The first observation is the clear slowdown in the pace of innovation in the chemical industry compared to the 1950s–60s, as attested by subsequent econometric studies, such as that of Achilladelis et al. (Reference Achilladelis, Schwarzkopf and Cines1990).

The second observation is the saturation of large markets built through property rights monopolies and the so-called ultimate plant strategy, theorised by the Dupont de Nemours company. In this strategy, productivity investments allowed for a drastic reduction in production costs in order to dissuade the entry of competitors. The downside of such a strategy is the creation of structural rigidities that are ill-equipped to cope with the new instability caused by market saturation and the instability of upstream and downstream prices.

The third observation is that the United States of America, in association with the large chemical companies concerned by the crisis of the large chemical production units (and the European Commission), would have developed state-of-the-art and prospective hypotheses on the fields likely to revive growth and innovation (van Laer Reference van Laer, Bouneau, Burigana and Varsori2010). These states of the art are constitutive of the work that the actors carry out around technological promises, as well as the place where common resources are constituted.

1.5.2 Chemistry and ‘Classical Bioindustries’ at the Heart of European Reflection

During this period, several reports and journal special issues were published. With the support of policymakers, they outlined the stakes in terms of industrial exploitation of the scientific revolution of genetic engineering in a complementary way with ‘classic’ bioindustries. The ‘classical’ bioindustries and chemistry are at the heart of the development of an engineering science of continuous processes, an essential condition for achieving productivity gains in large refineries (Danielou & Broun Reference Danielou and Broun1981). Beyond the product innovations introduced by genetic engineering, it is the capacity to propose catalytic reactions that is the most appreciated quality of biotechnologies. Indeed, these allow us to envisage an improvement in the efficiency of processes. However, it appears that industrialists will only adopt biotechnologies when they succeed in challenging the existing process (Penasse Reference Penasse1981). Between the two polar situations (domination of the classical chemical process vs. that of a biotechnological process), the authors of the reports and journals mentioned above saw a set of technological paths qualified as hemisynthesis (coupling or cascade use of chemical and biotech reactions) creating a set of new economic opportunities.

The authors did not envisage the disappearance of thermochemical processes from the bioindustry landscape in favour of biotechnological processes. Thus, in order to locate themselves in the space of competing trajectories, the actors produced analytical diagrams of the main sectors. These show that the current landscape was already mapped out in 1981. For example, Chesnais (Reference Chesnais1981) already listed the raw materials under discussion today, from oil shale to biomass or waste. Biomass is transformed in processes that go either towards synthesis gases (thermochemistry) imitating petroleum chemistry or towards fermentation processes that loop back on it from ethanol or diacids. It is the same carbon chains as those from ‘king oil’ that are targeted. Hence, there is confusion between bioindustries mobilising a biotechnological process and those mobilising biomasses, whatever the process.

The problematisation exercise then focuses on Schumpeterian ruptures within existing agro-industries and brings to light two elements that seem to us to be structuring today. On the one hand, innovation leads to the development of hyper-competition between biosourced raw materials as soon as scientific advances in biotechnologies can become continuous industrial processes (Zitt Reference Zitt1983, p. 42). On the other hand, biotechnological innovationFootnote ³ makes it possible to reconfigure the value chain to obtain control of the ‘global supply chain’ from intermediate products: ‘Finally, this mixed process-product innovation is significant for major trends in technological evolution in the bioindustries: the development of markets for intermediate products freed from a single agricultural source, and the emergence of a new technical operator, “immobilised enzymes”, of which the production of isoglucose is the most important industrial application to date’ (Ibid., p. 42).

From this point of view, the key variable of change is economic since, in theory, most petroleum chemical products can be produced from a biotechnological process. Research in biotechs is therefore oriented in a precise direction: to challenge each existing chemical or thermochemical process, in order to consider whether it is possible to envisage a substitution of these processes, with an identical product or final function (e.g. sweetness). This type of orientation based on a vision of the future of chemistry hybridised with biotechnologies thus generates a particular regime of knowledge production – and of the resulting economic activities (Cohendet et al. Reference Cohendet, Ledoux and Zuscovitch1987). This is dedicated to the enrichment of commons that are also specific, without the knowledge of thermochemistry targeted by the substitution disappearing for all that.

1.5.3 What Structure(s) for a Bioindustry-Based Chemistry?

The work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1978–79 and of the FAST EUR7767 program of the European Commission (DG XII), which brought together researchers and large chemical firms on the prospects for chemistry in Europe (well-known from the publications of the BETA laboratory in Strasbourg); Ancori & Cohendet (1984) had a definite influence on the development of the European chemical industry. These research programs identified four main themes around which it was proposed to articulate the innovation policy on a European scale: the chemistry of small moleculesFootnote ⁴ (linked to the renewal of carbochemistry), the chemistry of sugars, the chemistry of new materials, and the chemistry of function.

However, this way of organising these themes would suggest that the bioindustry would be reserved for sugar chemistry, which is not the case, as we will show. The challenges of small molecule chemistry are discussed as those of a renaissance of coal chemistry. The core of the promise of the bioindustry core lies in the fact that one could imagine substituting for the intermediates derived from petrochemistry, an intermediate derived from gasification of the carbon chains of coal – that is, methanol – on which it is possible to base a set of technological hopes. Like the five basic petrochemical intermediates,Footnote ⁵ ‘the downstream chemistry of methanol is very rich’ (Cohendet Reference Cohendet1982, p. 17). It allows the reformation of fuels and acetic acid, which serves as a base for plastics (PET), solvents, paints, and varnishes (Box 1.1).

However, biosourced routes for materials chemistry and functional chemistry have also been documented. It is therefore in the four themes of the report on the prospects for chemistry in Europe that we must look for traces of a problematisation of the bioindustry and not in only one, that of sugar chemistry. This observation is not surprising if we follow the work of Colombo, who was to be the founder of Novamont, a leading company in the conversion of Italian chemistry to renewables. In his 1980 article, based on a report for the OECD while he was in charge of R&D at Montedison, Colombo defended the need for a kind of technological pluralism, identifying the fields of activity where it is relevant to intervene with this or that technology, with the idea of achieving a better balance between centralised production (around the ultimate plants) and decentralised production (Colombo Reference Colombo1980).