How Much New Forest Land Would it Take to Offset a Coal Plant’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions? An Engineering Case Study of Georgia’s Plant Scherer

Abstract

Climate change is largely caused by continued use of fossil fuels to provide energy services. Increasingly, given the goal of mitigating climate change, organizations like power utilities are announcing “net-zero” greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions goals that do not necessarily require fossil fuel–fired facilities to mitigate their emissions or close. If paired with carbon dioxide removal (CDR), ongoing emissions could theoretically coexist with net-zero goals. CDR, however, is resource intensive, regardless of removal pathway. One common question is whether tree planting could be a low-impact pathway to compensate for ongoing or legacy GHG emissions, since trees take up atmospheric CO2 and store the carbon as wood. Although planting trees might sound like a benign climate strategy, the need for additionality and permanence means that forestry-based CDR has immense land requirements at climate-relevant scales. To contextualize this land intensity, this case study evaluates how much land would be required to counterbalance a utility’s emissions from a large coal-fired power plant in Georgia with forest-based CDR. Compensating for 1 year of plant emissions would require permanent industrial forestation of all land in the plant’s host county that is not already forested or developed (with buildings, roads, etc.), with a 30-year lead time—highlighting a key challenge of relying on tree planting to meet climate goals. Readers engaging this case will be able to discuss land use requirements of relying on compensatory forestry-based CDR for net-zero emissions goals, in addition to being prepared to replicate this analysis for other power plants or emitters.