Scaling Up Conference comes to Ottawa

The event’s founder Jeff Passmore, CEO of the Passmore Group, welcomed attendees to the conference and discussed the potential growth for this industry across Canada.

“This is an enormous opportunity,” he told the crowd, adding that if developed sustainably, the bioeconomy can grow jobs across the country while protecting the environment simultaneously.

He said collaboration between the public and private sectors is key to ensuring a successful bioeconomy in Canada.

“That’s why we decided to run this conference,” he said.

Passmore identified many of the risks that come with growing the bioeconomy, including technology scale-up risk; supply change risk; entrenched competitors with sunked costs; an uncertain policy environment; high capex and expensive debt financing and uncertain returns on investment.

“Despite the challenges, Canada cannot ignore its extensive biomass resources,” he said. “We have 160 million acres of crop and pasture land… There’s no shortage of biomass in the country, but it does have to be developed sustainably.”