Bio-CCS and Bio-CCUS in Climate Change Mitigation--Market and Regulatory Issues Related to Bio-CCUS

February 27, 2018

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(International Energy Agency Bioenergy Task 41) The fourth IEA Bioenergy Task 41 workshop on Bio-CC(U)S was organized in Brussels 16 January 2018. The topic of the workshop was Market and regulatory issues related to Bio-CCUS. The workshop was a full day event divided into four consecutive sessions:

Background and introduction: The session focused on bioenergy, bio-CCS/BECCS in general and as business cases, and the natural climate mitigation potential of forests. The session also included an overview of the importance of bioenergy with CCS in the recently published IEA Bioenergy Roadmap.
Policy perspectives: The session addressed different policy perspectives related to Bio-CCUS/BECCS and identified a set of gaps and opportunities including bottlenecks in Bio-CCS regulation.
Bio-CCS and Bio-CCU: The sessions on Bio-CCS and Bio-CCU addressed industrial experience and industrial potential of Bio-CCS, including waste-to-energy, forest industry, biogas production, and microalgae production.
The workshop was rounded off with a panel discussion led by Adam Brown from IEA. This report gives a brief summary of the workshop.

The objective of the workshop was a) to increase knowledge on the topic and contribute to the definition and establishment of terms drivers and impact mechanisms of the Bio-CC(U)S technologies, and b) to gather viewpoints of how different industrial sectors, governments and institutions see the implementation of these technologies.

BECCS and BECCU in the IEA Bioenergy Roadmap
Regardless of the expansion of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar over the past years bioenergy continues to dominate the renewable share of the global final energy consumption.

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Business cases based on negative CO2 emissions
The carbon reuse economy typically includes biotechnical upgrading, catalytic upgrading and thermochemical processes. Different drivers create sustainable business cases; decreasing CO2 emissions to mitigate climate change, the potential for new businesses, and expanding the resource basis and energy security of carbon.

CCS and CCU are fundamentally different, as illustrated in Figure 6. In CCS the CO2 is captured and permanently stored underground. In CCU the captured CO2 is utilized as carbon feedstock in the production of energy carriers, chemicals and materials. As a consequence, the impact mechanisms of CCS and CCU on climate change are different. As CCU does not remove CO2 from the carbon cycle, CCU can at best be carbon neutral.

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Climate change mitigation potential of forests
Forests are natural carbon sinks, utilizing atmospheric CO2 for the photosynthesis and stocking carbon during growth. Carbon is stored in both vegetation, vegetation litter and soil, but the carbon cycle of forests is a complex system and the exact carbon sink potential is uncertain. The type of forest strongly affects the carbon sink potential. For instance, there is a higher accumulation of carbon in boreal forests compared to tropical forests.

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The carbon sink potential varies, and is dependent on regional and local conditions such as policies, economy and use of wood. In Finland, current GHG emissions amount to 55 Mt CO₂-eq., while the land use, land use-change and forestry (LULUCF) carbon sink is 30 Mt CO₂-eq. Harvested wood products, for instance, constitute a small carbon sink. More than half of the harvested forest volume in Finland is used in products with short lifecycles, such as pulp, paperboard and paper. Most of the carbon stored in wood products is stored in sawn wood.

Increasing the climate change mitigation potential of forests would require reduced logging, improved silviculture, controlling drainage on agriculture, reduced forest drain and establishing a LULUCF sink to offset emissions from food production. Also disturbances such as wind damages, bark beetles, forest fires, etc. should be minimized to maintain and increase the potential. In Europe only around 55 m3 of timber was lost to various disturbances from 2002-2010. On the forest product side a higher production rate of products with longer lifespan would increase the potential. This can be challenging as the demand for these products is driven by consumers.

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Gaps and opportunities for BECC(U)S in current policies
Bioenergy is of a complex nature including different potential feedstock types, different conversion processes and a variety of end uses and end users.

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Embracing scenarios and possibilities that differ with several order of magnitudes depending on energy system, end use and regional conditions makes it impossible to talk about bioenergy in general terms. With this as a starting point, deploying large-scale Bio-CCS/BECCS may reduce the carbon emissions or even extract CO₂ from the atmosphere, but the consequences of the associated land-use change and CO₂ emissions could even offset part of the CO₂ sequestered by Bio-CCS in the first place. A few large-scale Bio-CCS installations are currently operating, mainly from corn ethanol production where CO₂ is collected and used in enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Apart from these projects in the US the overall performance of Bio-CCS has not yet been tested on large-scale, and both costs and public acceptance remain a challenge. The timeframe of sequestration, and thus the potential of carbon negativity also remains an important aspect; utilizing biogenic CO₂ for fuel production, for instance, will not sequester the carbon for a very long time.

Accounting for biogenic carbon has not yet been established. Standardizing a purposeful method for biogenic CO₂ accounting will be a major regulatory undertaking, especially if the CO₂ is used as feedstock in other processes. Tracking the carbon in Bio-CCU will require a complicated cross-sectional approach between the various supply and demand sides.

Other challenges that are still to be balanced by regulation, although not exclusively associated with Bio-CCUS, include seismic risks, potential CO₂ leakage and conflicting sub-surface land uses such as for instance extraction of drinking water and geothermal energy.

Bio-CCUS is only one alternative to sequester CO₂. Other opportunities include afforestation and reforestation, sequestration into biochar and soil carbon, ocean fertilization (adding nutrients to the oceans in order to stimulate phytoplankton growth and increasing CO₂ absorption), enhanced weathering (spreading CO₂-absorbing minerals), and direct air capture (DAC). Some of these opportunities will have larger and more direct social implications, such as for instance afforestation and reforestation that could conflict with other land use. Also DAC could possibly interfere with other land use, depending on the size of the installation.

Regulating Bio-CCUS and land use is a stepwise process.

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Legal bottlenecks in Bio-CCS regulation
The main differences between conventional CCS and Bio-CCS relates to the definition of negative emissions, the accounting of the achieved emissions reductions, and the yet to assess impact of carbon removal technologies on biodiversity and the water-energy-climate nexus. There is sufficient legal basis to work on, but developing Bio-CCS will require significant political will and currently there is a lack of strong incentives and rewards. Three main challenges in regulating Bio- CCS relate to affirming its place in target compliance strategies, supporting the use of Bio-CCS technologies, and addressing environmental uncertainties related to such use:

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Policy and governance challenges of achieving negative emissions with BECCS
One of the key points of BECCS as a means to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is to consider the environmental impacts along the entire supply chain from biomass production through to energy generation and utilization. This comprehensive supply chain analysis ensures that the full environmental impact is addressed.

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Bio-CCU
Utilizing captured CO2 as a feedstock in other processes can potentially decrease the rate of fossil carbon extraction. As such, Bio-CCU does not have a direct effect on reducing atmospheric CO2 emissions compared to Bio-CCS. The effect of Bio-CCU on the atmospheric CO2 concentration and hence its efficiency as a climate change mitigation tool depends on the lifecycle of the product produced with captured CO2. In order to effectively mitigate climate change the CO2 should be sequestered in the product for at least decades to centuries. For instance, utilizing atmospheric CO2 for synthetic fuel production to replace fossil fuels cannot be considered a CO2 removal technology as the original CO2 will in most cases not be contained for more than weeks or months before release back into the atmosphere.

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Currently, there is no incentive for bio-based industry to capture and store CO2. In order to be able to invest in and realize Bio-CCS and negative emissions, .... READ MORE