Thailand’s Biochemical Industry: 2020 Predictions vs. 2026 Reality

▶ Watch the full video on YouTube — part 2 of an 8-part seminar series by NSTDAChannel TVstation, Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency.

What the Seminar Was About

In March 2020, NSTDA hosted an 8-part academic seminar titled “Potential and Future of the Energy and Biochemical Industry in Thailand.” A panel of R&D representatives from three of the country’s biggest industrial groups — sugar producer Mitr Phol, state-linked PTT Global Chemical, and cement-and-chemicals conglomerate SCG — laid out how far Thailand had gotten toward turning farm waste into fuel, plastic, and chemicals.

The panel wasn’t selling anything. It was three corporate researchers telling an audience of academics, in plain terms, where the economics worked and where they didn’t. That candor is what makes the video worth revisiting now, with six more years of data on which predictions held up.

Thailand’s Raw-Material Advantage Is Real

Thailand’s case for a bioeconomy starts with volume, not technology. In the video, Mitr Phol’s research director says the country crushes around 100 million tons of sugarcane a year, generating roughly 31 million tons of bagasse as a by-product, per a panelist’s national feedstock overview. Add in the country’s other major crop residues — 28 million tons of cassava and 11 million tons of palm oil, both cited in the video — and the raw feedstock is genuinely abundant.

Mitr Phol turns that volume into three products, its researcher explains in the video: sugar, electricity, and ethanol. Every ton of cane yields about 110 kilograms of sugar, and the leftover bagasse feeds power plants at six mill sites with a combined capacity of roughly 168 megawatts, she says — enough to be worth comparing to a mid-sized hydro dam. Four ethanol plants add another 700,000 to 800,000 liters a day, according to the video, made from molasses that used to be sold off as low-value cattle feed.

What doesn’t get harvested matters just as much. Responding to an audience question in the video, the same Mitr Phol researcher says Thai cane fields yield only around 10 to 12 tons per rai of leftover leaf biomass, compared with roughly 20 tons per rai in Australia or Brazil. The company deliberately leaves most of that leaf litter on the ground rather than trucking it to a power plant, she says, because it holds soil moisture and feeds the microbial activity that keeps cane yields from falling further.

Why Bio-Based Chemicals Still Struggle to Beat Petrochemicals on Price

Cost is the real obstacle, and PTT Global Chemical’s researcher was blunt about it in the video: bio-based materials made up only about 17% of the global chemical industry in 2020, and he expected that share to climb by 10 to 15 percentage points within a decade — a meaningful gain, but nowhere near a takeover.

The reason comes down to feedstock economics. He opens the video by pointing out that raw material costs run 50 to 60% of production cost in petrochemicals, so any price gap in the feedstock shows up directly in the shelf price. His example in the video: after the US shale gas boom, American natural gas feedstock became roughly 5 to 6 times cheaper than the equivalent gas in Thailand, undercutting the case for switching to bio-based inputs almost everywhere shale gas reaches.

Consumer behavior doesn’t help close the gap. The panel’s go-to example was a bioplastic shopping bag that costs roughly twice as much as a conventional one — and shoppers, when asked directly, don’t pay the difference. In the video, he cites Coca-Cola’s PlantBottle packaging as the workaround: roughly 20% plant-based content in the video’s telling, with a stated goal of reaching 100% eventually, blending bio-based material in at a level consumers never notice or have to pay extra for.

Pharmaceuticals came up as the industry’s tempting but impractical alternative. A panelist says in the video’s Q&A that developing a single new drug costs around $500 million and takes 5 to 10 years — numbers that ruled it out as a side business for a petrochemical company, however attractive the margins looked on paper.

The 2026 Scorecard: Growth in Bagasse, Failure in Bioplastic

Thailand’s bagasse-to-power story kept expanding after the seminar. Industry groups now estimate that sugarcane leaves and other farm residue could support up to 650 megawatts of biomass power generation nationwide, according to BioEnergy Times, and the same report cites the state sugar regulator projecting annual leaf-biomass procurement rising from 2.14 million tons in the 2025–26 crop year to around 5 million tons by 2026–27. That growth lines up with a separate policy win: pre-harvest cane burning, long a major source of central Thailand’s air pollution, fell to just 3.8% of the 2025–26 harvest — comfortably under the government’s 10% ceiling, ChiniMandi reports.

Zoomed out further, Nation Thailand reports that Thailand’s official Bio-Circular-Green economy strategy — the national plan that grew out of exactly the sectors this seminar covered — now credits its four target industries with a combined 3.4 trillion baht in value, about 21% of GDP, with government projections putting that as high as 4.4 trillion baht, or 24% of GDP.

But the bioplastics side of the story — the part the seminar’s panelists were personally building — did not go the way they hoped. PTT Global Chemical’s joint venture with Mitsubishi Chemical, PTT MCC Biochem, ran Thailand’s only commercial-scale bio-PBS plant in Rayong, making a compostable plastic resin sold under the BioPBS brand. In May 2026, Mitsubishi Chemical announced it was withdrawing from the venture entirely. Production had already stopped that December, and the company’s own statement pointed to exactly the cost problem the 2020 panel had flagged: the business “continued to suffer from low profitability due to various factors, including a divergence between actual market conditions and initial assumptions.” The plant is being dismantled and the joint venture dissolved.

Read together, the two outcomes aren’t a contradiction — they’re the panel’s own logic playing out. Bagasse power and ethanol succeeded because they slot into existing electricity and fuel markets at a competitive price. Bio-PBS failed because it asked customers to pay a premium for a novel plastic, and — just as Coca-Cola’s blending strategy predicted back in 2020 — that premium never found enough buyers.

Thai Context: Where Bioenergy Policy Stands Now

Thailand’s cane-burning crackdown backs up what Mitr Phol’s researcher described in the video as a soil-conservation choice, not just an environmental one. The government pairs a per-ton subsidy for fresh, unburned cane with a penalty for burned deliveries, and that pricing pressure — not just enforcement — is a large part of why the burn rate has fallen so far, so fast.

On the biomass power side, the pipeline described in the video — Mitr Phol’s roughly 168 MW across six mills — is still small next to the 650 MW industry groups now say sugarcane residue alone could support. That gap is a market opportunity for developers, but it also depends on logistics the panel called out as unsolved in 2020: moving bulky, low-density crop residue from scattered fields to a processing plant costs money that a purely home-grown bagasse supply, sitting right at the mill, doesn’t have to pay.

Key Takeaways

• Thailand crushes roughly 100 million tons of sugarcane a year, producing about 31 million tons of bagasse — genuine feedstock volume for a domestic bioenergy sector.
• Mitr Phol alone runs roughly 168 MW of bagasse power capacity and 700,000-800,000 liters/day of ethanol production, built from what used to be waste. See our guide to small biogas system.
• Bio-based materials were about 17% of the global chemical industry in 2020; the panel expected only a modest rise, not a takeover, over the following decade.
• Thailand’s flagship commercial bioplastic venture, PTT MCC Biochem’s BioPBS plant, shut down in December 2025 after years of low profitability.
• Bagasse power, ethanol, and cane-burning reduction have all grown since 2020 — the parts of the bioeconomy that compete on price, not on a green premium. See our guide to waste-to-energy.

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