Poster's note : relevant to BECCS http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/05/investigation-does-the-uks-biomass-burning-help-solve-climate-change
Conclusion This DECC research project will report initial findings later this year. Meanwhile, the government is introducing mandatory sustainable sourcing requirements later this year. These won't please everyone. Richter tells Carbon Brief: "There's a lot of concerns about how clear the [sustainability] reporting is going to be." The European Commission says it will publish a new policy on sustainable biomass during 2016-17. Environmental groups want the commission to cap biomass use, to introduce strong sustainability standards, and to account for emissions from biomass burning within its emissions trading system (EU ETS). Whatever happens over the next few years, the party for biomass power in the UK will not last forever. At an event in March, Ed Davey, the UK's energy and climate secretary, questioned whether the UK should be adding more biomass electricity. He said the best research showed there was "good biomass and bad biomass" and that we had be "a bit more careful than people thought a few years ago". He added that biomass was only a "transitional" green power source. As Drax's Willey explains, the firm has to recover its investments by 2027, when biomass power subsidies are due to end. Until then, we need to know how much of the UK's burning biomass is helping the climate. If most of it isn't, the experiment should be cut short. Here's what we know so far: Good biomass includes fine woody residues taken from forests instead of burning it at the roadside, or leaving it to rot. Burning sawdust and sawmill residues is good for the climate, too, unless rising pellet demand indirectly drives deforestation in countries like Brazil. Bad biomass includes extracting larger pieces of woody residue rather than leaving them to decompose slowly on the forest floor, which might be no better for the climate than gas. The worst biomass of all would be if the surge in UK demand for wood pellets sees US forests harvested more frequently than they would have been otherwise. Evidence from the US government suggests this is already happening, and the climate impacts could be worse than coal. Drax has taken the commendable decision to publish its sourcing data. Yet its refusal to use the BEaC calculator, along with grey areas between pellet sourcing definitions, make it impossible to decide if the weight of biomass burning is good wood for the climate, or bad. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
