BECCS can’t scale up, would speed up warming, and requires too much land---the IPCC and the United Nations agree

*BECCS = Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, UN = United Nations

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has generated great interest as global emissions have soared to 50 billion tons (Gt) a year of CO2 equivalent. In theory, biomass could remove CO2 out of the air as it grows, and a CCS system on the bioenergy power plant could permanently bury the CO2, making BECCS potentially a “negative” emissions technology. But a growing body of research casts doubt on whether either bioenergy or BECCS are scalable climate solutions—or solutions at all. Those doubts are reinforced by findings from the first dynamic, integrated global modeling of BECCS by the researchers of Climate Interactive: 1. Policies to scale up bioenergy and BECCS would increase global warming for several decades, with net cooling not occurring until 2100 or beyond. 2. Scaling up BECCS to 2 to 3 Gt CO2/year would require a land area the size of India. 3. The best bioenergy strategy right now would be to let bioenergy plants retire without replacement, rather than putting CCS systems on them. So, treating bioenergy as inherently zero-CO2 or carbon neutral will invariably lead to policies harming the climate as it does in Europe—where wood is “likely to remain the biomass fuel of choice for electricity generation and heat, at least for the next 10 years and probably longer,” as a UK think tank noted in 2018. Scaling up BECCS is not carbon removal, but much more like deforestation. The world’s top mitigation experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scaled back BECCS projections in their 2900-page report assessing scientific knowledge on mitigation in 2022. They reported, “BECCS is not projected to be widely implemented for several decades.” The International Energy Agency has also steadily scaled back its use from “almost 5 Gt CO2” removal by 2060 in 2017 to only 1 Gt CO2 removal a year by 2050 in its September 2023 1.5°C (2.7°F) scenario. A 2022 review by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC) of the latest evidence on BECCS “finds that there are substantial risks of it failing to achieve net removals at all, or that any removals are delayed” beyond a useful timeframe. Because of this delay in net removals, analyzing BECCS requires a dynamic model that can look over decades. In 2021, a dynamic forest-level analysis found that after 20 years of operation, “the uncaptured emissions from BECCS” are nearly equal to that of a coal plant. BECCS has high emissions whether you are clear cutting or just thinning a forest. So, scaling it up would increase net U.S. emissions for decades. Why? It would take that long for the replanted seedlings to grow and absorb enough CO2 to make total BECCS life-cycle emissions negative compared to leaving the original trees alone and deploying the best low-carbon alternatives at that time. As the IPCC wrote in 2022, “In the case of BECCS, it should be noted that bio-energy typically is associated with early-on positive CO2 emissions and net-negative effects are only achieved in time (carbon debt), and its potential is limited.” And this carbon debt doesn’t even start to decline until biomass harvesting stops scaling up. Net negative would occur post-2100 if at all. And that means when scaling up, the effective cost per ton of net CO2 removed by BECCS is incalculably high because no net CO2 is removed. But seriously scaling up BECCS would likely require a billion acres or more. And “without a social justice lens, any attempt to fulfil the many land-based climate pledges is likely to perpetuate injustices” against indigenous people and local communities, a 2020 report found. Yet, as the EASAC noted, “the area of land required to generate energy from biomass is 50–100 times larger than for solar and wind and thus land usage for bioenergy is inefficient.” In 2021, the UN reported “agricultural systems [are] breaking down.” So, “there is little room for expanding the area of productive land, yet more than 95 percent of food is grown on land.” The impacts of large-scale BECCS (and worsening climate change) could sharply increase food prices. A multi-year study by the World Bank, UN, and others on how to feed the world in 2050 concluded that “the proportion of plant material diverted from food and fiber to energy would be unacceptably high— and that hopes of climate benefits are misplaced. We recommend phasing out bioenergy targets.” Finally, if the belief in BECCS leads the world to underinvest in real solutions like renewables now, then a 2020 study finds we risk overshooting our temperature target by “up to 1.4°C” (2.5°F)—and thus risk crossing dangerous climatic tipping points. The U.S. is headed toward misspending billions of dollars on Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for BECCS. Tax credits for continuing to scale up corn ethanol are an especially bad idea. Rather than being carbon neutral (even with CCS) corn ethanol is carbon intensive and should be phased out as we shift to electric vehicles running on renewables. Since BECCS is unlikely to be a scalable climate solution by 2050 if ever, the priority climate action this decade and next is to spend trillions of dollars deploying proven zero-carbon technologies, like solar, wind, and energy efficiency, while developing the next generation of zero-carbon technologies.