Education & Training Needs Assessment

1 – Current state of Bioenergy, Biofuels and Biochemicals sector

  • the commercialization and large-scale use of biomass energy is realized preliminarily.
  • the amount of biomass energy used per year reaches about 58 million tons of standard coal.
  • installed gross capacity of biomass power generation achieves 15 million kW (15GW), with the annual energy output of 90 billion kWh (90TWh);
  • the amount of biogas used per year reaches 8 billion m3, liquid biofuel to 6 million tons per year and biomass briquette to 30 million tons per year.

The “Bioenergy, Biofuels and Biochemicals” sector is becoming always more important for China in the last decades. Furthermore, it also became politically significant after the issuing of the “13th Five-Year Plan on Biomass Energy Development” (2016-2020) by People’s Republic of China government in March 2016. The Plan, in detail, aims to reach:

Moreover, there are extensive biomass resources in China.  The annual output of biomass is about 200-400 million tons of standard coal. However, most of the biomass is not efficiently used.

2 – Reasons for the implementation of Education and training in the Biomass Based Sector

All of the three Chinese Universitas under the Project are convinced that a sound education offer in the Biomass-Based (BB) sector will guarantee that students, after graduation, will be exploitable in the labour market in China and outside China. Furthermore, at the global/international level, the Chinese/European “One Belt, One Road” initiative promotes Chinese enterprises exploring the international markets in the countries involved in the initiative (Eurasia States). Thanks to the initiative, a workforce with appropriate training in the BB sector will be then able to compete in the job market at the international level.

Apart from the global level, in the local market, there is also a request of well-trained professionals in the BB sector, both from the public and private companies.

3 – SWOT Analysis

4 – BBChina Guideline

On the basis to SWOT Analysis, the new Master Program must focus on preparing well-trained students to get into the job market both at the local and global level.

The Program must train students making use of case studies and practical examples; this can be achieved also with a proper implementation of the foreseen common lab platform equipment.

The foreseen learning activities are planned to focus the students on the development of all the necessary soft-skills, such as: self-branding, team building, creative thinking/analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, market, gaining the customer perspective, lean start-up, economic and financial planning, design thinking for start-up, how to prepare a pitch, patent, market, value proposition, and understanding the mechanisms of investment of a venture capital and grants.

The Master Program target will be to prepare highly qualified engineers, managers, researchers and high-level operators in the field of biomass to energy and bioproducts, that will be able to complexly apply the acquired knowledge to form, assess and make effective decisions on biomass-based projects, on the basis of scientific argumentations.

The Master graduate will be able to follow the complex biomass to energy and bioproducts chain, to optimise each step of the chain and choose the adequate technology for every different step. Finally, The future graduate will be able to select the best conversion route for each raw material considered as the starting point, and to deal with the technology, market and regulation issues and to operate within the green market.