Spatially explicit analysis identifies significant potential for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage in China

Xiaofan Xing ,Philippe Ciais ,Tan Xu ,Yechen Yang ,Daniel S Goll ,Lin Wang ,Rong Wang ,Yutao Wang ,Qing X Li ,Xingnan Ye ,Oliviér Boucher ,Jianmin Chen ,James H Clark ,Xin Yang ,Gang Luo ,Nico Bauer ,Guofeng Shen ,Ivan A Janssens ,Junji Cao ,Yves Balkanski ,Wei Li ,Bo Pan ,Jianmin Ma ,Shicheng Zhang ,Josep Peñuelas ,Siqing Xu

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-23282-x

Abstract

As China ramped-up coal power capacities rapidly while CO2 emissions need to decline, these capacities would turn into stranded assets. To deal with this risk, a promising option is to retrofit these capacities to co-fire with biomass and eventually upgrade to CCS operation (BECCS), but the feasibility is debated with respect to negative impacts on broader sustainability issues. Here we present a data-rich spatially explicit approach to estimate the marginal cost curve for decarbonizing the power sector in China with BECCS. We identify a potential of 222 GW of power capacities in 2836 counties generated by co-firing 0.9 Gt of biomass from the same county, with half being agricultural residues. Our spatially explicit method helps to reduce uncertainty in the economic costs and emissions of BECCS, identify the best opportunities for bioenergy and show the limitations by logistical challenges to achieve carbon neutrality in the power sector with large-scale BECCS in China.

Highlights

As China ramped-up coal power capacities rapidly while CO2 emissions need to decline, these capacities would turn into stranded assets
Our central hypothesis is that biomass and eventually upgrade to carbon capture and storage (CCS) operation (BECCS) can be harnessed by (1) biomass utilization, including collection and pretreatment of agricultural and forestry residues, energy crop production, biomass handling, and transport to power plants, (2) retrofitting of coal-fired power plants to be suitable for biomass co-firing (90% weight) and CCS, and (3)
For forestry residues, our estimate based on the statistic of wood products is lower than that by Yang et al.[28], who estimated the wood feedstocks based on the forestry area, biomass resource yield and a constant collectable rate, but close to other estimates[34,37,38]

Summary

Results

CO2 1.12 year−1 of emissions from coal will be PWh year−1 in electricity, 0.92 PWh year−1 from agricultural residues, and 0.18 PWh year−1 from fuelwood It substitutes 26% of coal in China’s power plants and sequestrates 1:35Àþ00::0089 Gt year−1 of atmospheric CO2 into geological repositories; the above two emission reductions will be partly offset by 0:28Àþ00::1111 Gt CO2-eq year−1 due to life-cycle emissions from retrofitting power plants for biomass co-firing and CCS (338þÀ8648 kt CO2-eq year−1), pretreatment and logistics of biomass transportation (200þÀ6600 Mt CO2-eq year−1), production and application of fertilizers (80þÀ5500 Mt CO2-eq year−1), and land-use change if growing energy crops on grasslands To abate 1, 3, and 5 Gt CO2-eq year−1 by BECCS in Marginal cost of emission reduction ($ (t CO2-eq)-1)

B90-2030-PC

Gt 2 Gt 3 Gt 0

40 Gt NDC scenario

Methods

Code availability