The climate change mitigation potential of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) can act as a negative emission technology and is considered crucial in many climate change mitigation pathways that limit global warming to 1.5-2°C. The negative emission potential of BECCS has, however, not been rigorously assessed. Here, we perform a global spatially-explicit analysis of life-cycle GHG emissions for lignocellulosic crop-based BECCS.

We show that negative emissions strongly depend on biomass cultivation location, treatment of original vegetation, final energy carrier produced, and evaluation period considered. We find a global potential of 28 EJ/year for electricity with negative emissions, sequestering 2.5 Gtonne CO2/year when accounting emissions over 30 years, which increases to 220 EJ/year and 40 Gtonne CO2/year over 80 years. We show that BECCS sequestration projected in IPCC SR1.5°C pathways can biophysically be approached, but considering its potentially very large land requirements, recommend substantially lower and earlier deployment of BECCS.

This article is available on the publisher’s website via restricted access.

Authors

PBL Authors
Detlef van Vuuren Vassilis Daioglou Jonathan Doelman
Other authors
Steef Hanssen
Zoran Steinmann
Mark Huijbregts

Specifications

Publication title
The climate change mitigation potential of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
Publication date
24 August 2020
Publication type
Article
Page count
14
Publication language
English
Magazine
Nature Climate Change
Issue
2020
Product number
4245