Corn stover supply rating aids Sarnia-area effort to attract bio-chemical plants

Sarnia-Lambton has a new tool to help it convince bio-companies and investors the community is a good place to set up shop.

The Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership and Sarnia-based Bioindustrial Innovation Canada announced this week an investment grade Bioeconomy Development Opportunity (BDO) Zone “A” rating has been issued for the supply of corn stover bio-mass available in Sarnia-Lambton.

“This is a great tool,” Shauna Carr, with the economic partnership, said about the rating expected to help attract bio-chemical companies looking for locations to build manufacturing sites.

“I can say, ‘Hey look, we have this A rating when it comes to corn stover.’”

Stover refers to leaves, stalks, cobs and other parts of corn plants traditionally left in farm fields after harvest that can be used by bio-companies making such things as sustainable fuels and pharmaceuticals.

“The rating highlights the consistency and availability of corn stover to ensure financial success of facilities,” Carr said.

The economic partnership – a local economic development agency funded by Lambton County – has been working for several years to entice bio-chemical companies to locate in the community alongside its traditional petrochemical manufacturing sites.

“Historically, it has not necessarily been easy for those types of startups and those types of fledgling companies to raise the capital” they need, Carr said.

The BDO rating program is “very open and transparent,” and aimed at large financial institutions looking to invest in bio-chemistry companies, she said.

The zone rating is a “standard-based technical risk assessment of biomass feedstock, supply chain and infrastructure attributes” of a region’s potential for new biofuel, bio-product and renewable chemical plants, the agencies said in a news release.

The rating also tells bio-companies looking to use corn as its feedstock “we have the supply and you can take this now to the funders and say, ‘Hey look, we want to go to Sarnia-Lambton,’” Carr said.

The Sarnia-Lambton BDO zone is rated for 190,000 oven-dried metric tons annually of corn stover and is the program’s first rating in Ontario, the news release said.

“An investment-grade BDO Zone rating for close to 200,000 tonnes of stover should function as a bull’s-eye for a multitude of project development companies globally,” Jordan Soloman, chairperson of the BDO Zone Initiative, said in the release.

Carr said the zone designations “are big in the states” and have begun appearing in Canada.

The economic partnership and Bioindustrial Innovation Canada worked together on the local designation for about eight months, she said.

Carr said Sarnia-Lambton’s A rating can be moved up to an AA or AAA score in the future “with some fairly minor adjustments.”

She added it’s likely local agencies will consider seeking ratings for other forms of biomass.

“We just knew corn stover was the one we needed to start with,” Carr said.

Along with the supply of biomass available from local farms, the Sarnia area can point to its long history with chemical manufacturing while marketing the community to companies, she said.

“We’ve got the workforce that can do this,” as well as manufacturing shops to make equipment needed to build and support chemical manufacturers, Carr said. “This is what we do.”

California-based Origin Materials recently opened a site in Sarnia to make chemicals from wood biomass and LCY Biosciences also has a plant in the city. Suncor operates an ethanol plant in neighboring St. Clair Township that uses corn as its feedstock.

A few years ago, a London-based company was planning to build a site in Sarnia to turn corn and wheat stalks into sugar and the project progressed to the point where a co-op of local farms came together to supply it with biomass.

The co-op ceased operations in 2020 after the company, Comet Bio, shelved its plans for a Sarnia plant.

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