President Biden’s Executive Order (EO) on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy, a major biotechnology initiative in line with the 2012 National Bioeconomy Blueprint, will accelerate the bioeconomy across the country’s health, agriculture, and energy sectors. The efforts authorized through this EO, known collectively as the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, will support the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office’s (BETO) groundbreaking efforts to produce viable biofuels and bioproducts using sustainable sources of biomass and waste resources, and enable substantial investments to translate scientific discoveries into commercial applications.

The EO aligns with BETO priorities to:

• Leverage bioengineering, biomanufacturing, bioenergy, and biobased products to address the causes of climate change and reduce its impact,
• Use biotechnology and biomanufacturing to fortify a strong U.S. supply chain and drive U.S. global leadership in this sector,
• Invest in domestic infrastructure to accelerate bioenergy and bioproduct scientific advances to reduce commercialization hurdles and to create more U.S. jobs,
• Continue training young scientists and grow the diversity of the technical workforce,
• Stimulate economic growth by incentivizing and expanding biomanufacturing scale-up and capacity to bring bioproducts to market.

This timely and important initiative, announced in September 2022, affirms and advances BETO’s efforts across its bioenergy industry consortia and DOE national laboratory system to enable a thriving clean energy bioeconomy. 

For more information on this initiative, see the White House Factsheet and DOE’s Factsheet on Biotechnology & Biomanufacturing.