Sobering critique of BECCS

Sobering critique of BECCS.

What?

Planting trees, burning the trees in advanced power plants that fully scrub the exhaust of CO2, and then pump that CO2 into secure, long term storage deep underground.

Compared to DAC which uses a chemical process to sort the CO2 from the air, BECCS uses the natural chemistry of trees using photosynthesis to grab the CO2.

Why is this important?

ALL models of how we mitigate climate change - IPCC or otherwise all *assume* that we develop a method for "negative emissions" e.g. we grab the CO2 and put it back into the ground.

BECCS is different from "clean coal" or any other power plant that burns fossil fuel and captures the carbon in the exhaust plume, in that for BECCS the source fuel is NOT fossil fuel, it is trees that have recently pulled the carbon out of the air.

What is great about BECCS is that you lean into the natural systems of plants, less technology to innovate, just burn some trees very carefully, and put the carbon in the ground.

So it would seem to be cheaper, yet costs still appear to be $90 / ton of CO2.

But even if the costs of BECCS were FREE, it still costs lots of land and water to plant these trees and continuously harvest them for carbon sinking.

How much land?

Depending on your model, and how much carbon you want to sink - up to 1/3rd of all the world's current cropland.

Oh.

And we re going to add another 3 Billion people that want to eat by 2100. Or we need to increase the amount of food we are producing by 50% over this time, while removing cropland.

Oh.

https://fern.org/sites/default/files/news-pdf/Fern%20BECCS%20briefing_0.pdf

Originally posted on Facebook on October 16, 2018.