New paper on carbon-efficient bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) supply chain modelling

14 March 2022

New Carbon-Efficient BECCS Supply Chain Modelling Paper Exploring Where UK BECCS Facilities Should Go, by Muir Freer, Clair Gough, Andrew Welfle and Amanda Lea-Langton.

The paper “Putting Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage in a Spatial Context: What Should Go Where?” explores the implications of siting a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) facility to carbon emission performances for three case-study supply chains using the Carbon Navigation System (CNS) model. The three case-study supply chains are a wheat straw derived BECCS-power, a municipal solid waste derived BECCS-waste-to-energy and a sawmill residue derived BECCS-hydrogen. A BECCS facility needs to be carefully sited, taking into consideration its local low carbon infrastructure, available biomass and geography for successful deployment and achieving a favourable net-negative carbon balance. On average, across the three supply chains a 10 km shift in the siting of the BECCS facility results in an 8.6–13.1% increase in spatially explicit supply chain emissions. BECCS facilities producing low purity CO₂ at high yields have lower spatial emissions when located within the industrial clusters, while those producing high purity CO₂ at low yields perform better outside the clusters. A map is also generated identifying which of the three modelled supply chains delivers the lowest spatially explicit supply chain emission options for any given area of the UK at a 1 MtCO₂/yr capture scale.

Link to the paper: Putting Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage in a Spatial Context: What Should Go Where?

Freer M, Gough C, Welfle A and Lea-Langton A (2022) Putting Bioenergy With Carbon Capture and Storage in a Spatial Context: What Should Go Where? Front. Clim. 4:826982. doi: 10.3389/fclim.2022.826982

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