Removing carbon with bioenergy: An underrated climate solution for Europe

BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration) is a key tool in the fight against climate change along with other carbon removal methods and emissions reductions.

Despite its inherent advantages, BECCS is sometimes singled out for its land needs that could potentially conflict with other uses. These limitations should not prevent us from leveraging its significant potential. 

Pioneer projects are emerging in Europe and tackling existing bottlenecks; to fulfill the BECCS promise, they need support from private buyers and governments.

BECCS is an underrated player

BECCS is one of the established methods of CDR (or Carbon Dioxide Removal), a key tool in the fight against climate change. 

BECCS leverages bioenergy facilities that convert biomass into energy like heat, power, or biogas. The facilities are then equipped with hardware that captures the CO2 emitted by their process (combustion, fermentation, or gasification). Finally, captured CO2 is permanently sequestered, typically in geologic formations or concrete. 

Source: Carbon 180 BECCS factsheet

BECCS is a relatively straightforward method of removing carbon from the atmosphere. However, the inherent limitations of using large quantities of land, energy, and resources to grow the required biomass come into focus when considering scaling it to gigaton scales. This limitation has created a negative bias against BECCS, potentially preventing its potential from being realised. 

To understand the reasons behind this situation, it is worth looking at history.

A victim of its early academic success

Climate scientists are clear about the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In fact the latest IPCC report states unambiguously that CDR is unavoidable if we want to reach net zero emissions, a precondition to halt global warming. This need can be quickly understood when looking at the curve of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 which has now reached 425 ppm, a level not seen for millions of years! 

This was not always a given and resulted from our collective delay in addressing the climate emergency. Back in 2001, a group of scientists first floated the concept of a system of climate risk management that included reversing past emissions. A few years later, BECCS started to find its way as a negative emissions tool in models for greenhouse gas concentration stabilization. 

For a few years, BECCS was synonymous with negative emissions. This relative academic success led to estimated volumes of BECCS deployment reaching billions of tons in climate models. Land requirements, as well as nutrients, water, and other resources needed to grow the corresponding biomass, were unrealistic. This made BECCS compete with other constrained uses such as agriculture or forestry. Since then, BECCS has often been associated with adverse effects on the environment and communities.

BECCS has to be looked at from the right angle

This narrative of a land- and resource-hungry solution should now be put into perspective. Today, the scientific consensus shows that BECCS is just one of the multiple CDR avenues that need to be deployed at scale along with other methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere. To have a more balanced view of BECCS's potential, we can go back to some fundamentals. 

Upstream, growing biomass is one of the rare proven methods to capture CO2 at scale. The underlying technology, photosynthesis, has been implemented in nature for millions of years. Humans are using biomass everywhere in the economy, from agriculture to biomaterials and bioenergy at a considerable scale already. This existing bioeconomy should be the starting point for BECCS before considering growing dedicated crops for energy or carbon removal. From there, sustainability criteria should be added to ensure that only residual biomass is used, meaning biomass that does not have a better usage. 

Downstream, bioenergy facilities emit CO2 back into the atmosphere at varying concentrations. They range from 10-15% for combustion to 95-99% for fermentation processes. This existing stream of CO2 (also known as biogenic CO2) is extremely valuable from a climate point of view. Indeed, thermodynamics ensures that the energy needed to capture biogenic CO2 is significantly lower than that required to capture CO2 directly from the air. Moreover, the technology to separate CO2 at these concentrations is commercial and deploying fast. 

For permanent sequestration, geologic storage in depleted hydrocarbon fields, deep saline aquifers, or basalt rocks have the potential to store gigatons of CO2 and capacities are already being built. 

Finally, to ensure sound principles are applied, a Life Cycle Analysis needs to be performed for each project across its value chain, considering carbon and other environmental and societal aspects.

Europe has a vast supply of sustainable biomass

Conditions are present in Europe for a massive, sustainable BECCS deployment. The continent has a vibrant and reasonably sustainable bioenergy sector on the one hand and CO2 sequestration infrastructure under development on the other. A recent study has assessed BECCS potential in Europe at 200 million tons per year, which is significant in view of the continent’s climate needs.

Source: Rosa et al (2021): Assessment of carbon dioxide removal potential via BECCS in a carbon-neutral Europe

Biogenic CO2 sources in Europe are diversified in origin and size ranging from large pulp and paper facilities that emit up to a million tons of CO2 each year to combined heat and power plants, waste incinerators (that emit both fossil and biogenic CO2 from urban waste streams) and wastewater treatment plants, which all have a potential of a few thousands to tens of thousands of tons per year. 

In addition to those relatively large sources (which can be counted in the hundreds), there are thousands of smaller and more distributed biogas and biomethane plants that could provide, in aggregate, around a third of the total volumes. 

Biomass sources are also diversified and include agricultural waste (manure, corn waste, herbs, cover crops, etc), food waste, forestry residues and household waste. They use mostly existing flows and do not require growing energy crops or converting land.

As a co-benefit, developing BECCS in synergy with these different emitters can reinforce useful sectors of the bioeconomy by providing them with additional revenues from the commercialization of carbon removal credits. 

The continent is also building geologic storage capacities

Regarding geologic sequestration, offshore CO2 storage capacity is currently developed in the North Sea (for example, Northern Lights in Norway and other projects in Denmark, the UK, and the Netherlands) and in South Europe (CCS Ravenna in the Adriatic offshore Italy). Onshore sequestration and on-site underground mineralization are also considered but less mature today.

This infrastructure will grow in the following years to fulfill industry demand. Some hard-to-abate sectors, such as cement, steel, chemicals, and other industries, will need to dispose of CO2 to reach climate neutrality in the mid-term in the absence of alternative processes. The EU is formulating strategies to support this build-up with an Industrial Carbon Management strategy and the Net Zero Industry Act, which is mandating 50 million tons of CO2 sequestration capacity for 2030.

First learning from early developments

At the end of 2024, no BECCS project associated with geologic sequestration was in operation in Europe yet; however, a few were in advanced development and a handful were in construction. Some projects sequestering small quantities in concrete are also operational.

These pioneering projects face several hurdles before becoming a reality. Biogenic CO2 is abundant and the technologies to separate it is commercially available. However, only a limited number of carbon capture units have been deployed, and operational data is limited. On top of it, the projects require clean energy which is not always available locally. Hence, the projects are still relatively complex for biomass facility operators to implement. For biomethane plants that already purify biogas, there is no real need for separation and some biomethane units are already equipped with liquefaction systems to condition their CO2 for transport.

This brings us to the first real bottleneck which is transport infrastructure. CO2 can be transported by land to port facilities using trucks and trains fitted with liquid CO2 containers. However this method has a high cost as the volumes are relatively small. Economies of scale can happen when larger modes of transport are mobilized such as full trains, barges and ships. In the longer run CO2 pipelines will provide a cheap and scalable method of transporting CO2 but they are probably a decade away from being operational. 

Geologic sequestration is also a bottleneck. The first phase of pioneering offshore projects is entering into operation with limited capacities. More projects are coming online in the next months and years. Also, not all projects can accommodate the relatively small quantities needed for distributed BECCS, and port terminals required to ship CO2 to offshore locations in places like Rotterdam and Dunkirk are still in development. 

Finally regulations and demand signals for CDR in general and BECCS in particular are still emerging. Today early buyers on the voluntary carbon market are helping jumpstart the sector. There need to be more corporate players that include CDR in their climate roadmaps to reinforce this early demand signal. Over term, policy needs to take over with regulation of CDR using multiple levers. Governments can include CDR in their long term climate planning and objectives. They can also reinforce funding for research and innovation, incentivize early voluntary demand and create compliance markets for CDR. Encouraging signals are currently being sent across numerous jurisdictions including the EU and some of its member states, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. These efforts need to be amplified in the next months and years if CDR and BECCS are to reach a climate meaningful scale in the relevant timeline. 

A bright future for BECCS is within reach

BECCS is no silver bullet for climate action. It will probably never be implemented at multiple billions of tons per year due to its inherent limitation, namely the availability of sustainably sourced residual biomass. However, it is relatively low-hanging fruit that regions such as Europe can mobilise in the next couple of years to initiate the scaling up of CDR technologies. It will help reinforce decarbonization efforts in our way towards climate neutrality. 

In the long term, we can already dream of a carbon-negative world, removing more greenhouse gas from the atmosphere than humanity emits. In this world, we would be on our way to regenerating our atmosphere to be closer to pre-industrial CO2 concentrations. We cannot say for sure what bioenergy's role will be on that horizon but one thing is almost certain: all biomass and biogas facilities will be removing CO2 from the atmosphere via BECCS by then. Let’s start making this vision a reality by building the first projects today, one at a time!