REPORT: BIOMASS WITH CCS COULD HAVE BRIGHT FUTURE, ESPECIALLY IN EUROPE

Farris Willingham
GHG Monitor
06/22/12

The widespread deployment of biomass with carbon capture and storage technology is “urgently” needed if the international community wants to keep climate change at a manageable level, though the technology still has a ways to go in terms of development, according to a new report. In order to cap global temperature increases at 2° Celsius, widely seen as the maximum increase possible to keep the effects of climate change manageable, government and industry must invest heavily in the technology, a study co-released this week by the Zero Emissions Platform—the CCS expert advisory committee to the European Union—and the European Biofuels Technology Platform, its biomass counterpart, argues. The technology, known as bio-CCS, could be particularly attractive for Europe, which in recent years has increased the utilization of biofuels and bioenergy due to emissions reduction targets. Pairing biomass with CCS technology could be “low-hanging fruit for early, low-cost CCS deployment,” the study says, while also potentially leading to some “industry sectors emitting below zero, which could offset emissions in other sectors where reductions are more difficult to attain.”

Bio-CCS Creates ‘Carbon-Negative’ System

The study says that bio-CCS, which combines sustainable biomass conversions with CCS technology, is the only large-scale technology that can physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere after it is emitted. Biomass binds CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows, and once it is converted into energy or fuels, the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere, said Jonas Helseth, deputy director for Bellona Europa and co-author of the report. However, if that CO2 is captured, transported and stored before it is released, it results in a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, having what is sometimes described as ‘negative emissions.’ With bio-CCS, plants are capable of capturing and storing more emissions than they produce because the biomass is growing, Helseth said in an interview. “The biomass is growing everyday, and it takes up CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows,” he said. “So if you can ensure that the biomass supply is sustainable, meaning that you actually grow new biomass when you take out biomass from the system to replace it over time, then you can actually get the carbon negative-system when you capture that CO2.”

In Europe, where biomass use is increasing steadily and expected to contribute to roughly 11 percent of total final energy consumption by 2020, the potential for bio-CCS could be particularly large, the study says. If all available European sustainable biomass is combined with CCS, the technology could remove up to 800 Mt CO2 annually, the report says. Large industrial operations in particular could be choice sites for bio-CCS projects, according to the report, because there are typically industrial clusters where CCS infrastructure can be shared and economies of scale utilized. The report cites a previous International Energy Agency Greenhouse Gas program (IEA GHG) study that concluded that bio-CCS has the potential to remove approximately 10 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2050—the equivalent to roughly a third of all current energy-related CO2 emissions worldwide.

Still a Long Way to Go

The report, though, acknowledges that the technology still has a long way to go in terms of development. “Bio-CCS is, to a large extent, an unexplored avenue of action, with a number of complex questions to be analyzed and answered,” the report concludes. Helseth said that there is also still a high cost to develop bio-CCS, mostly because it requires the utilization of technologies that are still emerging. The cost of those technologies, he said, are expected to decrease over time, though. “Estimates show that once the once the technology’s been commercialized, the prices will go down fairly quickly,” Helseth said. This is because the expense to maintain a bio-CSS project becomes dependent on the cost of the biomass fuel, the report said. “Co-firing biomass with coal or lignite at moderate percentages (at least up to 10 percent) is not expected to require additional investment in CCS equipment compared to CCS for coal or lignite only,” according to the report.

The report recommends several measures to advance Bio-CSS. One method entails incentivizing its large-scale deployment through economic incentives, possibly by rewarding plants for reaching negative emissions via the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, as well as in non-ETS related arenas to provide long-term certainty to investors. To commercialize bio-CCS, funding must be provided for R&D work, as well as pilot projects to improve technologies, the report says.