For example, the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5☌ laid out three pathways that include BECCS.

Some climate scenarios assume BECCS deployment at scales that exceed our planetary boundaries. One of the most important considerations for BECCS is land use requirements for feedstock cultivation and the consequent risk of displacing agricultural production or carbon storage in forests. A policy incentive framework resting on uncertain or unreliable carbon accounting frameworks may stifle opportunities to commercially develop variants of BECCS that do provide climate benefits. These overlooked temporal dimensions may be critically important to global climate change mitigation.

Even where the carbon neutral assumption is valid in the long term, it can take several decades of biomass regrowth to overcome an initial carbon deficit. Climate models generally assume that biomass for energy is inherently carbon neutral, 8 but this assumption may not be valid if feedstocks displace agricultural production and lead to deforestation, forest degradation or loss of carbon-rich grasslands. There is significant complexity, uncertainty and political contention surrounding net carbon accounting for BECCS. The value of the energy provided by BECCS reduces its net cost of carbon removal compared with other technological options. 7Ī primary benefit of BECCS is that it provides energy whereas other carbon removal pathways like direct air capture use energy. 6 Gasification of biomass to hydrogen would enable near-complete capture of embodied CO 2, but is at an earlier stage of development. 5 BECCS in the power sector enables higher capture rates but faces competitive disadvantages relative to wind and solar. Capturing CO 2 from the fermentation of biomass into liquid fuels is relatively low cost but only captures about half of the CO 2 because emissions are not captured when the produced fuel is combusted in vehicles. 4īECCS systems can combust biomass directly for heat or power production, convert it to liquid fuels via fermentation or gasify it to hydrogen among other possible pathways.

2 3 However, the net carbon removal potential from using these feedstocks is roughly half that released due to losses in collection, transport and conversion. While the global potential scale of these feedstocks is uncertain, an estimated 500 Mt of waste material is available in the US 1 and around 37 Mt is available in the UK-equivalent to around 10% of the country’s CO 2 emissions in 2018-from municipal solid waste and forestry byproducts. As a result, more recent analyses have focused on the prospect of using waste biomass feedstocks, like forestry and agricultural residues, or municipal waste. Actual deployment, however, will likely be considerably lower than what these models predict as the supply of biomass is constrained by competing land uses. The main way in which BECCS can provide net carbon removal is by storing and capturing CO 2 from biomass that would otherwise return to the atmosphere.īECCS is assumed to have a prominent role in many integrated assessment models of climate change, mainly due to its presumed low-future-cost. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is the process of using biomass, such as trees, crops, or residues, for energy and capturing and storing the carbon in that biomass before it is released back into the atmosphere.

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