Bioenergy with carbon capture distracts from real climate solutions

Subsidies for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) risk diverting large sums of funding to projects unlikely to benefit the climate. Instead, they should be spent on home insulation and heat pumps that will reduce carbon emissions and relieve fuel poverty, argues Almuth Ernsting.

Almuth Ernsting is co-founder and co-director of Biofuelwatch.

On 30th September, the European Commission published its “Proposal for a Regulation on an EU certification for carbon removals”, aimed at incentivising carbon offsets for activities deemed to be ‘carbon negative’.

Over 200 civil society organisations denounced the proposal, which warned that “In this strategy, every ton of promised future CDR [carbon dioxide removal] represents emissions that are bringing us more climate chaos today”.

One of the main technologies promoted in the proposal is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which has already attracted EU financial support, including through the Innovation Fund.

Environmental NGOs and scientists have long warned that BECCS could accelerate demand for biomass, i.e., for forest wood and for dedicated crops and trees, resulting in high carbon emissions from forest degradation and land conversion, loss of wildlife habitat, and competition with food crops. If BECCS could be applied on a large scale, those would indeed be major concerns.

Yet, as a new Biofuelwatch report shows, there are no signs of any company being close to acquiring the technical know-how to capture carbon from biomass burning at scale. In the report, Biofuelwatch identifies and discusses 17 carbon projects involving biomass plants and waste incinerators worldwide, most of them in EU countries.

We have included carbon capture from waste incinerators in the report because operators are speaking of a potential to go ‘carbon negative’ if more than 50% of the feedstock is ‘biogenic’. The largest existing carbon capture project of this type, in the Netherlands, already burns additional biomass alongside mixed waste. 

The technical challenges are well-documented: high energy requirements make carbon capture prohibitively expensive (except for capturing certain pure CO2 streams, e.g., from ethanol fermentation); pollutants in flue gases cause the solvents that capture the CO2 to degrade or carry them into other parts of the plant, leading to corrosion.

To put BECCS into context: companies and researchers have spent decades trying to develop carbon capture from coal plants, yet to date, there is only one commercial coal plant capturing CO2, and that plant, based in Canada, is expected to make net losses throughout its lifetime.

By comparison, experience with carbon capture from biomass and waste-derived flue gases is in its infancy. Indeed, of the 29 commercial-scale CCS projects worldwide, the majority capture pure CO2 streams, while another 13 involve gas processing, a sector where CO2 removal has been practised since the 1930s as part of ‘gas sweetening’. 

It is, therefore, unsurprising that the amount of carbon captured from any of the 17 projects considered is tiny. The largest amount was captured at a Dutch waste incinerator in 2021, but even that amounted to less than 11% of the plant’s emissions.

Later that year, carbon capture had to be suspended due to corrosion. All of the CO2 captured from such plants is either vented to the atmosphere, used in greenhouses to help plants grow faster or, in Japan, to fertilise algae for anti-ageing skin cream production, with no discernible benefit to the climate.

At first sight, however, it is surprising that developers are announcing plans to scale up their carbon capture from biomass and waste plants by as much as 200,000 times (Stockholm Exergi), with no evidence that they can do so. They are responding to generous subsidies being offered by member states under the EU’s Green Deal.

Back in 2018, the European Court of Auditors found that the €424 million of EU grants for carbon capture (EEPR and NER30) spent between 2008 and 2017 had “not contributed to the construction and entry-into-operation of any CCS demonstration project”.

There is every chance that new funding frameworks and incentives for BECCS, including via the certification of ‘carbon removals’, will result in hundreds of millions of euros being similarly wasted. Even worse, new funding frameworks could legitimise more fossil fuel emissions with the unfounded assumption that CO2 can be taken out of the atmosphere again with technologies like BECCS. 

Spending the same subsidies on proven measures, such as home insulation and heat pumps, on the other hand, would be certain to reduce carbon emissions while alleviating fuel poverty at the same time.