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
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
