Partnership for Policy Integrity | Assessing the Risks of Biomass as a Long Term Energy Source

This grant will support the writing and publication of two papers on the critical role of the land-use sector in addressing climate change and that critique policies and technological developments that incorporate burning forest biomass as a part of a zero-carbon solution. One paper, The RED's Paper Tiger, will explain and interpret the RED II criteria for forest biomass, set out the arguments about why the criteria are not protective, and explain what policy changes are needed to protect the great forests of Northern Europe and North America from being harvested for fuel. 

The second paper, is an analysis of BECCS, by Mary Booth and Brendan Mackey of Griffith University in Australia, which examines whether there is any climate benefit to using forest wood in the (still unproven) geoengineering strategy of Bio-energy with Carbon Capture & Storage (BECCS). They use a simple carbon accounting model to address three questions: Can BECCS deliver facility-level negative emissions? How do different fuels affect the net impact of BECCS? And is there a climate benefit from deploying BECCS? They will model scenarios based on five different fuel types with and without carbon capture and storage: crops; plantation forests; natural forests; forest residues, and mill residues.