Bioenergy has the potential to help secure UK energy supplies, mitigate climate change, and create significant green growth opportunities if deployed effectively – ETI report

• ETI publishes insights into potential of the UK Bioenergy Sector


• Biomass combined with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) remains the only credible route to deliver negative emissions to help meet the UK’s 2050 climate change targets
• Hubs of bioenergy production with CCS appear to be efficient value chain options
• UK land is finite and valuable – optimisation of land use, including for biomass production, will be important

Bioenergy has the potential to help secure UK energy supplies, mitigate climate change, and create significant green growth opportunities if deployed effectively, according to a new report from the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).

The Insight into the UK’s future bioenergy sector, written by Dr Geraldine Newton-Cross, the ETI’s Bioenergy Strategy Manager, uses learnings from the ETI’s Bioenergy Value Chain Model (BVCM).

BVCM was designed to model full system bioenergy value chains over the next five decades to identify the most effective way of using bioenergy, taking into account the available resources, the geography of the UK, time, technology options and logistics networks.

It reaffirms the importance of combining bioenergy with CCS to help meet the UK’s 2050 Climate Change targets through the delivery of negative emissions and suggests that hubs of bioenergy production with CCS are created to produce economically efficient value chains for infrastructure planning.

Gasification is also identified as one of the most flexible, scalable, efficient and cost effective bioenergy technologies for further development as it can produce multiple energy vectors, including hydrogen and syngas. The report also highlights some of the locational preferences in the UK for different bioenergy feedstocks.

Geraldine Newton-Cross, the ETI’s Bioenergy Strategy Manager said:

“Deployed effectively, bioenergy has the potential to help secure UK energy supplies, mitigate climate change, and create significant green growth opportunities. It could play two important roles as biomass combined with carbon capture and storage remains the only credible way to deliver negative emissions cost effectively and biomass and waste could deliver a significant amount of low carbon energy in a future UK energy system.

Our Bioenergy Value Chain Model is a comprehensive and flexible toolkit that enables us to model how the UK bioenergy sector may develop over the next five decades. It helps to inform views on which biomass feedstocks should be grown, when and where, and which technologies are suitable for deployment across the UK to deliver the most valuable energy vectors and emission savings to the future UK energy system.

UK land is finite and valuable but with the right prioritisation the modelling work suggests the country could deliver sufficient sustainably produced biomass feedstock to make a hugely important contribution to the delivery of the UKs overall greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.”

The report’s findings include:

• Biomass with carbon capture and storage remains the only credible, cost-effective route to deliver the negative emissions required to help the UK to meet its 2050 emission reduction targets
• The lowest carbon pathways convert biomass to hydrogen and power, in preference to biomethane and biofuels, although bio-heat could be an important low-carbon pathway where there is demand, and could act as an early market stimulus for UK-grown sustainable biomass feedstocks.
• Gasification is a key technology for developing the bioenergy sector, as it is one of the most flexible, scalable, cost-effective and efficient bioenergy technologies in development
• Optimal locations for biomass production have been identified, taking in to account the system level trade-offs between where you may get maximum yields, and where you want to convert the feedstocks to energy
• Identification of the optimal combinations of feedstocks and conversion technologies at the specified locations for CO2 sequestration across the UKThe report highlights the most attractive areas for growing crops - the west and north west of the UK for Short Rotation Coppice Willow, Miscanthus in the south and east of the UK and Short Rotation Forestry in the south and east of the country, based on trade-offs between areas likely to give the better yields and the cost and emissions associated with where demand is greatest.

Hubs of bioenergy production when combined with CCS appear to be efficient value chain options. The report highlights gasification to hydrogen with CCS in the west of England at Barrow-in-Furness and Combined Cycle Gas Turbines running on syngas at Thames and Easington in the east of England as effective combined locations.

A link to the Insight report, video and infographic can be found here

The ETI recently published a report which showed the UK can implement an affordable transition to a low carbon energy system by 2050 but decisions taken in the next decade will be critical and it is important to develop, commercialise and integrate technologies and solutions that are already known, but underdeveloped. It can be found here