Regional Capability–Resource Alignment for Sustainable Bioenergy Transitions: Structural Sorting and Place-Based Pathways in China

Biomass-based energy transitions depend not only on resource availability but also on whether regional capabilities match the material and organisational requirements of different feedstocks. Using a balanced panel of 30 Chinese provinces during 2012–2022, this study treats New Quality Productive Forces (NQPF) as a proxy for regional productive and innovative capabilities and examines their association with five theoretical biomass resource potentials. Two-way fixed effects, a stacked province–resource–year model, a Mundlak Within–Between decomposition, province-specific trend checks, small-cluster inference, multiplicity adjustment, and a provincial diagnostic typology are combined to distinguish aggregate relationships, resource-specific heterogeneity, and persistent cross-provincial structure. Under the baseline entropy-weighted specification, aggregate NQPF is positively associated with theoretical carbon-mitigation potential, but the association is attenuated by province-specific trends and is not reproduced by equal-weight or PCA re-aggregations. At the resource level, New Modes–agricultural residues and New Industries–livestock manure retain nominal support under wild-cluster inference but not family-level multiplicity adjustment. The strongest multiplicity-adjusted evidence concerns overall cross-resource differentiation for New Drivers and is persistent between structural sorting for New Industries, whose long-term provincial mean is negatively associated with agricultural residues, forestry and orchard residues, livestock manure, and wastewater biomass and positively associated with municipal solid waste. Component-level patterns are therefore treated as exploratory. A 2022 four-quadrant typology further shows that capability–resource configurations are resource-specific, with livestock manure displaying the most gap-type configurations and municipal solid waste showing the strongest tendency toward same-direction capability–resource configurations. Capability–resource alignment is thus best treated as an ex ante screening condition rather than a causal or project-readiness measure; ecological retention, competing uses, lifecycle performance, circularity, logistics, finance, and governance remain necessary sustainability filters.