Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS)

Unlocking Negative Emissions

Clair Gough, Patricia Thornley, Sarah Mander, Naomi Vaughan, Amanda Lea-Langton, Clair Gough, Patricia Thornley, Sarah Mander, Naomi Vaughan, Amanda Lea-Langton

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119237686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Energy

An essential resource for understanding the potential role for biomass energy with carbon capture and storage in addressing climate change

Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) offers a comprehensive review of the characteristics of BECCS technologies in relation to its various applications. The authors — a team of expert professionals — bring together in one volume the technical, scientific, social, economic and governance issues relating to the potential deployment of BECCS as a key approach to climate change mitigation.

The text contains information on the current and future opportunities and constraints for biomass energy, explores the technologies involved in BECCS systems and the performance characteristics of a variety of technical systems. In addition, the text includes an examination of the role of BECCS in climate change mitigation, carbon accounting across the supply chain and policy frameworks. The authors also offer a review of the social and ethical aspects as well as the costs and economics of BECCS. This important text:

• Reveals the role BECCS could play in the transition to a low-carbon economy
• Discusses the wide variety of technical and non-technical constraints of BECCS
• Presents the basics of biomass energy systems
• Reviews the technical and engineering issues pertinent to BECCS
• Explores the societal implications of BECCS systems

Written for academics and research professionals, Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) brings together in one volume the issues surrounding BECCS in an accessible and authoritative manner.

Part I
BECCS Technologies

Chapter 1
Understanding Negative Emissions From BECCS

Clair Gough¹, Sarah Mander¹, Patricia Thornley¹, Amanda Lea‐Langton¹, and Naomi Vaughan²

¹Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, School of Mechanical Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Manchester, UK

²School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

1.1 Introduction

Changes in our climate are driven by human activity such as agriculture, deforestation and burning coal, oil and gas. The single most significant driver of climate change is the increase in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) in our atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels. Efforts to limit the impacts of climate change focus on reducing the emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases and adapting to live with the changing climate. In recent years, a third approach has gained significant attention: action to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and store the CO₂ for long timescales (over hundreds of years). Recent negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) delivered the 2015 Paris Agreement, which set a target of limiting global average temperature rise to ‘well below 2 °C’ (the 2 °C target having been agreed within the UNFCCC in 2010) while ‘pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C’ (UNFCCC, 2015). These are ambitious goals that will require immediate and radical emissions reductions if they are to be met. The idea of introducing ‘negative emissions’ is born out of the gap between the current trajectory in global emissions and the pathway necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. The most prominent proposal for achieving such negative emissions is to use biomass as a feedstock to generate electricity (or produce biofuels or hydrogen), capture the CO₂ during production and store it underground in geological reservoirs – biomass energy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS for short. However, the negative emissions concept remains just that, a concept; in principle, technologies such as BECCS can deliver net CO₂ removal at a project scale, or potentially at a global scale sufficient to impact atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and associated global average temperatures – but in practice, this potential has yet to be accessed at anything like a global scale. This book explores the challenges of unlocking negative emissions using BECCS.

Future climate change is most commonly explored using a suite of models that represent the Earth’s climate system, the physical and socio‐economic impacts of a changing climate and the greenhouse gases and other drivers generated by the global economy and energy systems. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are used to create scenarios of future emissions that are used by climate and impact models. The growing and significant dependence on BECCS in future emissions scenarios in global IAMs has placed BECCS at the centre of the discourse around achieving targets of 2 °C global average temperature rise and, following the 2015 Paris Agreement, 1.5 °C. This reliance on BECCS hinges on its potential to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere in order to maintain a sustainable atmospheric concentration of CO₂ in a cost‐effective manner.

There are many different technical options that could deliver negative emissions via BECCS and these vary in their technology readiness level (TRL). Some of the closer‐to‐market BECCS technologies are composed of component parts that have been proven and tested, but integration and deployment have not yet been demonstrated at commercial scale. Consequently, there remain significant uncertainties associated with BECCS performance and costs. Understanding the potential for, and implications of, pursuing BECCS requires an interdisciplinary approach. It has been suggested that BECCS could play a role in offsetting hard‐to‐abate sectors (e.g. agriculture and aviation) or enable delayed action on mitigation. While the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ continues to rise and policy objectives focus on limiting warming to 1.5 °C, it becomes increasingly likely that a means of delivering negative emissions will be required. Whether or not limiting warming to 1.5 °C is feasible without negative emissions remains unclear. In 2018, the IPCC will deliver a special report devoted to understanding the emissions pathways and impacts associated with 1.5 °C.

Despite its significance within the formal policy goals, there is very little practical experience of implementing the technology in commercial applications and limited research into the practicalities of implementation and conditions for accelerating deployment. Combining modern biomass energy systems with CCS not only presents technical and scientific challenges but, to be implemented at scales large enough to deliver global net negative emissions, also depends on other factors, such as geopolitics and supply‐chain integration and may have significant societal implications. To understand BECCS, what it can offer and how it might contribute to climate‐change mitigation, it is essential t...