Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS): Finding the win–wins for energy, negative emissions and ecosystem services—size matters

Caspar Donnison,Astley Hastings,Robert A Holland,Felix Eigenbrod,Gail Taylor,Lindsay‐Marie Armstrong

doi:10.1111/gcbb.12695

Abstract

AbstractBioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) features heavily in the energy scenarios designed to meet the Paris Agreement targets, but the models used to generate these scenarios do not address environmental and social implications of BECCS at the regional scale. We integrate ecosystem service values into a land‐use optimization tool to determine the favourability of six potential UK locations for a 500 MW BECCS power plant operating on local biomass resources. Annually, each BECCS plant requires 2.33 Mt of biomass and generates 2.99 Mt CO2 of negative emissions and 3.72 TWh of electricity. We make three important discoveries: (a) the impacts of BECCS on ecosystem services are spatially discrete, with the most favourable locations for UK BECCS identified at Drax and Easington, where net annual welfare values (from the basket of ecosystems services quantified) of £39 and £25 million were generated, respectively, with notably lower annual welfare values at Barrow (−£6 million) and Thames (£2 million); (b) larger BECCS deployment beyond 500 MW reduces net social welfare values, with a 1 GW BECCS plant at Drax generating a net annual welfare value of £19 million (a 50% decline compared with the 500 MW deployment), and a welfare loss at all other sites; (c) BECCS can be deployed to generate net welfare gains, but trade‐offs and co‐benefits between ecosystem services are highly site and context specific, and these landscape‐scale, site‐specific impacts should be central to future BECCS policy developments. For the United Kingdom, meeting the Paris Agreement targets through reliance on BECCS requires over 1 GW at each of the six locations considered here and is likely, therefore, to result in a significant welfare loss. This implies that an increased number of smaller BECCS deployments will be needed to ensure a win–win for energy, negative emissions and ecosystem services.

Highlights

Average global temperatures are one degree warmer than during the pre-industrial era (Allen et al, 2018) and despite commitments made by governments under the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2016), the current trajectory is of increased emissions and further warming, with a prediction that global average temperatures could breach the 1.5°C average warming threshold as soon as 2030
Interaction between those environmental values which could be quantified was explored by calculating Spearman's correlation coefficients. These were calculated for pairs of ecosystem services present at each of the Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) location options in order to establish whether a positive correlation or trade-off relationship existed
We developed a land-use optimization tool which integrated environmental and social values and generated landuse scenarios for site-specific deployment of BECCS in the United Kingdom

Summary

| INTRODUCTION

Average global temperatures are one degree warmer than during the pre-industrial era (Allen et al, 2018) and despite commitments made by governments under the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2016), the current trajectory is of increased emissions and further warming, with a prediction that global average temperatures could breach the 1.5°C average warming threshold as soon as 2030. BECCS deployment can be economically competitive by the 2030s (Committee on Climate Change, 2018a; UK Carbon Capture & Storage Cost Reduction Task Force, 2013) and CCC scenarios include up to 15 GW of BECCS capacity delivering 67 Mt (0.067 Gt) of CO2 removal per year by 2050, whilst Daggash, Heuberger, and Mac Dowell (2019) model 8.5 GW of BECCS generation capacity capturing 51 Mt (0.051 Gt) of CO2 per year in the United Kingdom by 2050 They estimate that meeting the UK 1.5°C target would require an estimated 15 GW of BECCS capacity. In addition to these options, we consider BECCS deployment on existing energy infrastructure sites at Drax, the United Kingdom's largest power station (Drax, 2018); Peterhead, a gas power plant well connected to the North Sea and previously considered for CCS (BEIS, 2015); and Easington, a major gas terminal (see Figure 1)

| MATERIALS AND METHODS

| RESULTS

CONCLUSIONS