Biomass electricity could help some western states reach their goals of reducing the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere.
Capture and sequestration of carbon gases, combined with sustainable grown feed for animals, could assist locations in the western United States reach carbon reduction goals by 2050.
University of California, Berkeley researchers found that combining sequestration technologies with carbon capture could result in power plants storing more carbon than they produce. This is true, even for power generators using coal, oil, and other "dirty" energy sources.
"There are a lot of commercial uncertainties about carbon capture and sequestration technologies. Nevertheless, we're taking this technology and showing that in the Western United States 35 years from now, Beccs doesn't merely let you reduce emissions by 80 percent - the current 2050 goal in California - but gets the power system to negative carbon emissions: you store more carbon than you create," Daniel Sanchez, a graduate student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, said.
Biomass is considered to be carbon-neutral, since it releases only as much carbon as the plant took in during its life. Crops and forests, produced in a sustainable manner, along with some urban waste, can be used as biomass to produce energy.
Bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (Beccs) could be a vital tool in the drive to lower carbon emissions by the middle of the century, researchers determined. This could be essential to meeting carbon goals if reductions in other locations prove difficult to reach.
"Biomass, if managed sustainably can provide the 'sink' for carbon that, if utilized in concert with low-carbon generation technologies, can enable us to reduce carbon in the atmosphere," Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (Rael), said.
A complex computer model was utilized to simulate the power grid of the western United States, and determine how biomass and Beccs could influence future carbon emissions. Simulations using the model predict that by the year 2050, it may be possible to reduce carbon emissions to levels 45 percent lower than they were in 1990. This improvement could happen with just seven percent of power being generated from Beccs systems, researchers determined.
According to the study, generating electricity from biomass is better for the environment than using the material for fuel, due to the ability to capture and sequester carbon.
Investigation of the role of biomass and Beccs in reducing carbon emissions was detailed in the journal Nature Climate Change.
