Euroviews. The EU and UK are backing the wrong horse in the race to net zero

Bioenergy has been much in the headlines over the last year, especially regarding the reform of the EU’s rules for how burning forest wood qualifies as “renewable energy.” 

It’s always been far-fetched to rely on burning trees — which emit more CO2 than coal when burned and take decades to regrow — as a way to “reduce” emissions. 

But climate policy could be about to go further off-track with a new focus on biomass energy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, as a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (in climate-speak, achieve “negative emissions”).

BECCS is a prime example of how to waste money on a hopeless technology. The idea is to take CO2 emissions from burning biomass - which in the EU and UK is mostly derived from forests - concentrate it, and pump it belowground into geological formations. 

The claim is that this process will suck CO2 out of the air. This holds an understandable appeal to policymakers, after all, who wouldn’t want to remove carbon from the atmosphere while generating electricity?

But do you see the problem? There’s nothing about taking the decades-old carbon stored in a tree and parking it belowground that will deliver “negative emissions”. 

It might prevent emissions from entering the atmosphere, as carbon capture and storage can theoretically achieve if used with coal, but it’s not going to draw down atmospheric CO2 in a timeframe meaningful for climate mitigation. 

In fact, promoting the logging of more forests will possibly increase CO2 emissions, because logging causes forest ecosystems to leak carbon.

International carbon reporting rules confirm that BECCS using forest biomass won’t plausibly remove net CO2 from the atmosphere in line with EU and UK 2050 “net zero” emissions goals, but