Demanding more from the biofuel sector

Olivier Mace, owner of Broadmanor Consulting, looks into his crystal ball to analyse the state of the biofuels market as the industry powers ahead into the new year.
There is a concept in thermodynamics called Entropy – a dimension rather hard to grasp, which is often referred to as “a measure of disorder”.
The greater the entropy of a system, the greater its randomness and disorder. Now, entropy has this remarkable property that within a closed system – such as the entire Universe – the entropy can never go down, but only stay flat or increase. Truly, for entropy, “the only way is up”.
One may be forgiven for thinking that the biofuels world is a good example of entropy in action. The volatility of its markets, the complexity of its regulations and its overall randomness (for lack of a better word) seem to only ever move in one direction: MORE.
More complexity of target setting and sub-targets, more sectors, more sustainability requirements and feedstock categorisations, more complicated GHG escalation mechanisms. More (in fact last year, much more) volatility of pricing, and market conditions described by many participants as...