GHG Daily
1/13/2016
Regardless of a continued push by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the deployment of large-scale net-negative CO2 emissions technology, little has been done to scale up deployment of bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), according to a new article by University of California, Berkeley researchers Daniel Sanchez and Daniel Kammen. The researchers identified several missed opportunities in BECCS and laid out a path forward for commercialization.
The paper suggests that to support the deployment of BECCS, more attention be paid to its potential application in thermochemical conversation processes. “The early development of BECCS has been focused on biochemical facilities converting sugars to ethanol, a transportation fuel, for use in enhanced oil recovery and large-scale industrial sequestration demonstration4. Yet, biochemical conversion pathways are limited by the market size of fuel products, scale, sensitivity to biomass inputs, and throughput,” the researchers wrote in their Jan. 11 article in the journal Nature. “In contrast to biochemical conversion, thermochemical conversion of coal and biomass enables large-scale production of fuels and electricity with a wide range of carbon intensities, process efficiencies and process scales.”
