🤔 Imagine you sat on 15Mt of wet residues and your goal was to do whatever is best for the climate? What would you do?

🏭 According to a recent study: BECCS / Bionenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. All the way. It delivers around double the climate benefit of the next best solution: animal feed substitution.

🧑‍🔬 A bit more context on this fascinating study: the authors looked at a concrete use case, namely two Dutch coal-fired power plants to be converted to 100% BECCS.

📊 The residues in question were pellets from the U.S. and bagasse from Brazil. It then looked at the overall climate impact of six different use cases: natural decomposition, material use, bioenergy without CCS, biofuels, animal feed, and BECCS.

😱 After roughly year 7, BECCS overtakes decomposition and all other options achieving a total 0.6t of net removal per ton of biomass used over a 30 year period.

🚛 Interestingly, the fact that the residues were imported from another continent played a role in the LCA, but does not change the overall conclusion.

🤷 So what? Should we use all residues for BECCS? 

⚠️ Well, there is at least one major omission in this paper: it does not compare BECCS to other biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) approaches, particularly biochar - both as carbon removal and as coke replacement in steel production.

🪵 Further, it really focuses on large-scale, centralised residues (of which there is plenty). However, a lot of biomass is decentralised, heterogenous, and often small-scale, which I expect to tilt the balance towards other solutions.

🧠 Overall, I still found this paper very insightful. I love how it takes a tangible real world example as a base for its analysis. And - to me at least - the conclusions were far from obvious.

📣 Big shout out to the authors Susan Caroline Alvarado Cummings, Martin Junginger, Steef Hanssen, Floor van der Hilst, and Anna Duden for this - maybe you can do something similar comparing different BiCRS approaches next?

👇 Link to the full study in the comments.

❓ What is your take? Did these findings resonate?

Follow the conversation