Bioenergy is a big opportunity, but we need evidence

19th June 2013

Bioenergy offers enormous potential value in moving the UK to a low carbon future because it is so flexible and versatile. We can convert biomass to deliver heat, power, gas and liquid fuels, helping to cut emissions across our national energy system.

The ETI's internationally peer reviewed UK energy system model suggests that bioenergy can save us tens of billions of pounds from the national bill for low carbon energy, heat and transport in future decades. That's the equivalent of saving £1,000 or more on average household energy and transport bills. So if we can source enough sustainably produced biomass, the potential is huge.

But is this sustainable? Does it reduce carbon emissions? Claims and counter-claims are voiced strongly, but often without empirical evidence. The impact on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions depends on biomass, crop type, the direct change in land use, the detail of changes in soil carbon as well as the impacts on related markets. We need to create and understand the evidence to make bioenergy something that investors and consumers alike can trust.

This is why we are investing in one of the world's largest in-depth field trial studies, drawing together partners and academics to directly measure the impact of bioenergy crop land-use changes on soil carbon and GHG emissions. The Ecosystem Land-Use Modelling project strengthens our understanding of where to produce biomass, how to do this in a way that delivers greatest benefit, and builds confidence about the impacts of biomass production.

But we also need to produce biomass without undermining food production or other environmental impacts, and it needs to be acceptable to the public with a commercially viable business model for growers.

So we are working on how to create an enabling environment for sustainable UK biomass production. This means understanding what motivates farmers to grow energy crops, how to build logistics and value chains, and how energy and agricultural policies can support sustainable biomass production.

We spend billions of pounds every year on agricultural and energy subsidies - and bioenergy is where they intersect. We want to explore ways of joining up these resources and policies to create a better enabling environment. Of course this will need to be done realistically and carefully, making sure that biodiversity and landscape impacts are managed. But the scale of potential opportunity and of existing policy support suggests that the scope is there. If we need to support UK energy crops, while carbon prices are low, we should be asking how we can adapt existing subsidies to promote environmentally responsible biomass production.

We also need to make engineering work, by developing technologies to convert bioenergy for use in homes, vehicles and industry. We are working to build knowledge - for example on the best technologies for using biomass with carbon capture and storage. This could be particularly valuable, providing a route to 'negative emissions' by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We are also working to develop new technologies to gasify waste streams and unlock this as a potential clean energy source.

While the UK may never have the land to rival the biomass production potential of some countries, our work suggests that we still have a sizeable opportunity using lower grade land. Bioenergy crops produced sustainably can be valuable - saving billions off the bill for decarbonising the economy. This is too big an opportunity to be dismissed without investing in building the empirical evidence. Then we will know exactly where and how to produce biomass sustainably, how we can persuade growers to produce and how we can build the value chains to deliver flexible, low carbon energy.

By George Day is head of economic strategy at the Energy Technologies Institute