welcome everybody to today's webinar on beck's bio energy with carbon capture and storage my name is david morrow i'm the director of research here at the institute for carbon removal law and policy at american university i'll be moderating today's webinar and i am very pleased to welcome our three outstanding panelists today we have dan sanchez from the department of environmental science policy and management at university of california in berkeley sam savitz an analyst with the energy futures initiative efi and meiron tesfaye at the bipartisan policy center uh here in d.c uh also a berkeley phd i believe so berkeley's well-represented here today before i turn things over to our panelists a few quick logistical remarks the first half of our webinar or so will consist of presentations from our three panelists followed by q a with the audience other than myself and the panelists everyone will remain muted throughout the webinar so please use zoom's q a function to submit your questions and i will pass those on to the panelists this webinar is being recorded if you have to step out early the entire webinar will be posted to the institute for carbon removal law and policies website at carbonremoval.info that's carbon removal all one word dot info and so without further ado dan why don't you tell us about bex sounds great and thanks everyone for the opportunity uh to speak today i'm gonna walk briefly through some slides um providing an introduction to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage or beccs or bex as it is um perhaps affectionately known i'm a professor of cooperative extension um at uc berkeley and i've spent much of the past decade studying these technologies and technologies similar technologies that use biomass to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere um so when we talk about how we remove carbon from the atmosphere there are really kind of two approaches one of those uses biology plants when they grow they use photosynthesis they fix co2 out of the air and they store it in their plant biomass and we can use things like plants or grasses or trees or other kind of biological processes in order to store carbon in places like like the land or in the ocean on the other side of the equation we have engineered carbon removal technologies and these are approaches that use chemistry primarily to remove co2 from the air they can include things like storing co2 underground and deep geologic formations storing co2 in long-lived products or storing them in things like concrete and other kinds of building materials just to give you an idea again these biological approaches they can they can span things like restoration and management of terrestrial land or aquatic ecosystems um carbon farming as it's affectionately known but the idea that we can change our agricultural practices to store more carbon and soils on the other on the other side in engineered we have direct air capture technologies these use chemistry to concentrate co2 from its concentration in the atmosphere which is .04 percent um up to nearly pure co2 where it's captured and typically stored underground in a geologic formation we can do similar things by mining reactive minerals and exposing them to the air and using chemistry to to suck up that co2 bio energy with carbon capture and storage sits at this really interesting kind of interface between the biological and the engineered approaches you know and the more time that i've spent thinking about it uh it really embodies both the best and the worst of these biological approaches and i think that's why uh bex can look like such a promising technology but also a scary and harmful technology if uh not implemented correctly and with proper sustainability limits you know bex is an approach that uses biomass that grows and so you know uses photosynthesis as kind of the first step of of removing this co2 from the atmosphere but then uses lots of chemistry and engineering to make different products to capture the co2 um and to and to store it in some kind of long-lived product of formation so let's focus on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage you know just blocking you from the left to right of this figure biomass when it grows as i said before it fixes co2 from the atmosphere that biomass has been harvested and transported to a energy conversion process coupled with carbon capture and sequestration and it really makes two different products one is energy product that can be electricity or fuels or hydrogen or take your pick uh it also creates co2 that's available to be compressed and sequestered or fixed in another product um it gets a lot more complicated from that once you start breaking down what's in those boxes and you know what those things actually represent there are a lot of different potential sources of biomass available for bex some of those can be classified as wastes or residues which can make help us feel more comfortable about their sustainability impacts but some of them also include dedicated energy crops or or primary forests or you know other things that we um that we grow and manage and harvest already um the biomass is then brought to a production facility where they can use either one or notice thermochemical methods using heat and catalysis to make products or biochemical methods using enzymes and you know yeasts and bacterias to turn the biomass into the final products and the final products can be heat electricity liquid fuels like gasoline or ethanol drop in fuels or sorry gaseous fuels like hydrogen or renewable natural gas really anything you can think of and the trick here is that all of these processes during their conversion process give off a stream of pure biogenic co2 that was carbon that was recently in the atmosphere before restored in biomass and capturing and storing that allows these processes to have net negative emissions or be carbon removing um i think we understand and know that carbon removal technologies play a tremendously large role in stringent climate change mitigation scenarios um about five or so years ago maybe a little bit further back um bex was modeled and represented in these portfolios at scales by the by mid century and in the century as large as 10 billion tons per year or larger of carbon removal using bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration um that is a tremendously large number uh it is likely not compatible with planetary boundaries and sustainability um but it's kind of how bex was thrust into the you know the limelight of climate change mitigation um but we need to be frank that really there is you know not billions of tons of this technology deployed right now we're talking about millions of tons um and you know really to this date we're talking about one project in the central uh illinois in the united states where they're capturing co2 from a very large dry or wet mill ethanol facility capturing it and storing it on site and this is a biorefinery operated by actual daniers midland uh one of the largest kind of agribusinesses in the midwest of the united states so again this is this is a really simple system we're just basically capturing pure co2 running it through pumps and compressors um and storing it about five thousand feet underground and what's known as the amount of time and sandstone there are three really good seals on top of that where we're storing that too so we hope it will stay there and all the evidence to date is that it has um but this is this is what's going on in uh in decatur i think there are a lot of other places where we can talk about deploying decks and that's where most of my research focuses ethanol is a really a kind of low hanging opportunity people are talking about building you know uh multi-billion dollar multi-state pipelines to move co2 from biorefineries to where we can put it underground kind of crisscrossing the midwest of the united producing biogas is another really exciting opportunity we won't be able to get into that today another really parallel technology is biochar production which stores carbon in a long-lived carbonaceous compound rather than in deep geologic formations or products but in many ways biochar and vex are kind of close cousins if you will there are other places where we can capture co2 from biomass that goes in paper facilities you can actually even run direct air capture machines um using biomass and bioenergy and well there's some reasons why there's some really strong engineering synergies between the two systems but i think suffice it to say that you know we need to spend a lot more time talking about realistic scenarios and near-term implementation of this technology that's what i hope the rest of our panelists can really focus on today and that we can bring out during our discussion i'll just say a couple of hypotheses you know i think we're gonna we're gonna take advantage of kind of some of these low and no cost co2 capture methods um that naturally arise when returning biomass in the products i think that's gonna be a place where we start to capture co2 and put it underground it's going to be a really near-term market i think these facilities are in many cases going to be a lot smaller than we expected and modularity is you know both a good thing and a bad thing you can have a lot of systems but these are small systems and so the trade-offs between those costs can be hard and then we know really understanding what realistic next is it means that we need to understand regional conditions regional market demands and sectoral policies and we need to think about becks outside of the electricity sector which is where it was kind of shoehorned in in the first place um all then by saying that the state of california is making a lot of progress on this um we have policies in place to pay for carbon negative things um we have grant money available for biomass with carbon capture and storage that we're going to try to be deplaying this year and i really suspect it's going to be kind of a first market in the united states and in the world for these technologies want to make sure we have time for everyone else so i'll stop here and um really look forward to the the question and answer and the discussion thank you thanks dan that was really helpful i want to turn next to sam one of the authors of efi's recent report on bex to tell us what they found in their survey of the beck's landscape sure so uh thank you david thank you to the institute for inviting me to present on our findings um so uh for efi is a washington dc based think tank we were founded by former energy secretary ernest moniz back in 2017 we focus on climate solutions based on innovation and technologies policies and business models so we've been researching uh carbon dioxide removal since about 2018 our first report which was called clearing the air uh proposed uh an 11 billion dollars roughly whole of government research and development program for carbon removal across a wide range of technologies and what we found in the course of writing that report was that there's really a disproportionate focus in washington both from a research perspective and a policy perspective on only certain technologies within the family of carbon removal and specifically on direct air capture and on natural solutions uh like dan talked about with uh forestation soil carbon things like that so after clearing the air we went on to write a series of reports that we called frontiers of cbr on some of these lesser explored areas like ocean methods or mineralization methods uh and then we wanted to turn to bex in part because of this big focus within integrated assessment modeling that that dan talked about so our first stage of this project which we call sowing the seeds of a negative carbon future is to we did a literature review that we called surveying the vex landscape and uh we identified we released this report in january we identified a series of key findings that i'll walk through today the second phase of the project involves diving deeper on specific subjects that we wanted to to delve more into uh including but by working with some other folks on this panel and you can see that the topics that we're diving into there we held a public workshop to kick off phase two last week on wednesday uh that featured the current secretary of agriculture tom dilsack and that should be available online later this week if anyone wants to go and check it out uh and our our second phase will culminate in another report that will focus really on policy dimensions for backs so our our first couple of findings here uh the first one really uh repeats a lot of what dan was talking about with the scale of bex becks that the intergovernmental panel on climate change projected that you might need up to eight gigatons eight billion tons of backs by 2050 but that this potential for bex really stands in as uh as a substitute for other sorts of cdr and that the likely scale might not be quite that large but that the potential is still vast something between three and thirty percent of uh total global emissions could be potentially removed with backs and in the u.s in in particular there's
a large potential too possibly up up to one or two gigatons but that deployment is low right now that there are 16 projects globally but only that one in illinois that's really large scale the rest are all at pilot and demonstration scales despite that uh there's the us is sort of especially suited to bec's in a couple of different ways we have this existing bioenergy industry you can see in the map on the right this shows both the location of current and planned vex projects as well as current bioenergy facilities specifically those that would be eligible for the 45q tax credit for carbon sequestration and and so in addition to having this huge existing industry that you could add carbon capture to or work with on bex projects that there's a high feed stock potential for additional bio energy as well as a large geologic storage resource for co2 so we really take an expansive view of vex in this report uh this breaks down similarly to what dan showed the various components of a beck's process but we found that a lot of the literature is focused on a narrow subset of these technologies uh specifically on combustion of wood and wood wastes or on corn ethanol but that there's and specifically those with post-combustion capture and then geologic storage or enhanced oil recovery so there's a whole world for each of these components of new types of feedstocks to to look into like engineered crops uh new energy conversion technologies to look into like production of hydrogen for example that could be really useful for decarbonization and then new capture pathways too so for example we include the biochar process if it's producing an energy co-product as as a type of bex as well and this doesn't even capture the whole world of of other sorts of things like bioproducts that could be produced through similar processes uh but a lot of these technologies there are different stages of readiness the the corn ethanol and the and the wood combustion can be deployed right now whereas some of these other technologies require more research and more uh demonstration before they're really commercializable so one of the big issues we heard going into this project was facts isn't actually net negative that because of the land use change required for feedstock growing both direct and indirect land use change that the emissions caused by that or the emissions from other parts the process offset any removals that it has and what we found is that in fact specs can certainly be net negative under the right circumstances but that it's dependent it's dependent on a specific project and the specific supply chain that goes into that project it also depends on your accounting system and where you draw your your system boundary both in time and in space but we found in particular that there's a lot of issues with greenhouse gas accounting and a greater consensus is really needed in order to move backs forward that each of these steps in the bex process that you can see on the slide have different questions around accounting some of them are more easy to solve than others but that they need to be addressed before you can really have a full-scale vex system or bec's deployment so one thing we found also is despite this extensive resource space in the united states that you would still need a lot more infrastructure to actually deploy backs at the scale of hundreds of millions of tons or billions of tons and that's both supply chains for biomass and infrastructure for energy conversion and particularly for co2 storage the co2 storage infrastructure is a big problem with with getting deployment done today but that coordination a specific advantage of bex is that coordination with other sorts of technologies is is really easy there's specific synergies that becks can have so some of these things might be shared co2 infrastructure with other things like natural gas power plants industrial facilities or direct air capture there could also be advantages of deploying backs in concert with natural solutions like forestation uh or forest management that prevents wildfires uh helps prevent wildfires and then in particular bex is also useful for decarbonizing existing energy systems it can provide carbon negative firm power it can provide fuels uh that can that can help with existing decarbonization that that mitigation benefit in addition to the removal benefit and we found that there's opportunities for regional hubs for example shared co2 infrastructure shared fuels production infrastructure if you're doing something like hydrogen or renewable natural gas this next set of findings on community impacts i'm sure we'll hear a lot about in the next presentation so i don't want to step on and on any toes but uh the basics of what we found is that uh there's a key problem that applies to bex but that's universal for for all kinds of clean energy infrastructure which is we don't want to uh perpetuate the inequalities that were created by by former and uh energy infrastructures or other sorts of infrastructures don't want to perpetuate that environmental racism or the burden of pollution and and so because several components of the bex system have local uh you know local pollutions local admittance um that's something you have to worry about we found at the same time bex has opportunities for communities so you can see here that the traditional forestry industries like wood products and pulp and paper have lost a lot of jobs roughly half a million over the last 20 years and bex can help put some of those revitalize some of those communities transition some workers to new jobs and additionally transition workers and things like fossil fuel industries and communities that are dependent on those industries and in general bex provides a really unique opportunity for rural economic development and job growth finally this is something that we're delving deeper into in the second phase of our report but the policy landscape for backs so the big problems for the policy landscape are that bioenergy and ccs have policies related to them but not vexed together the the phrase specs bioenergy of ccs didn't appear at all in federal statute until 2020 and even then it's just one research program at doe toe but that these programs also are spread throughout the government however because there are all these programs that exist for things like bioenergy and ccs there's a strong foundation to build on for bec's policy so that could be things for example the renewable fuel standard that's administered by the epa which mandates certain amounts of biofuel and gasoline and diesel the research and innovation at doe in particular this new carbon removal research program things like usda like the biomass crop assistance program that pays farmers to produce biomass for for energy as well as usda's role as one of the largest forest donors in the west through the forest service and then of course tax credits things like the renewable power credit uh renewable fuel credits and the 45 q credit that i mentioned earlier none of these things are particularly adapted to bex's net negative capabilities so there needs to be new policy that really values that but there is a foundation to build on so with that just want to say thank you again um and to check out our report as well as our webinar from our workshop from last week um and with that i will uh hand it back thank you all right thanks sam as a reminder to all of our participants if you do have questions about anything that any of our panelists have said you can use the q a feature on zoom to submit questions you can do that at any time and after our presentations i will feed those questions to the panelists uh some of those issues that sam raised about sustainability are especially important to us here at the institute for carbon removal law and policy which is why i'm very excited to introduce our next speaker who is an expert on just those topics um so i will turn it over now to mayron tes5 from bipartisan policy center oh are you all able to see my screen okay hi everybody um thanks for having me and thank you for the institute for the opportunity to present a little bit of our thinking and our approach to bex um as you have noticed from the last two speakers there's a lot of complex dynamics that are embedded in this approach that encompasses various technologies and um for most of my time last year uh i spent a lot of time thinking about what meaningful deployment of this technology would look like um and just to kind of maybe uh say a little bit more on what what's already said um um of course um you know carbon removal solutions are a broad range uh as stan mentioned and biomass based solutions kind of lie at this really interesting but also challenging intersection of what we consider to be land-based as well as tech-based solutions um so this is um largely stems from the you know origin of um the fact that uh specs or uh solutions that aren't biomass dependent use photosynthesis um and biochemical systems to absorb co2 from the atmosphere and then that is converted into other useful products as well as uh geologically stored underground using technology solutions um so this puts them at the at an interesting intersection but as we've heard from the last two speakers they are also really kind of uh struggling in terms of uh the deployment and deployment and part of the reason is because they continue to kind of uh bex continues to lie at the intersection of many uh many interests many stakeholders and many value systems and i'll try to highlight that and i'll try to um kind of point to how we're approaching uh that kind of intersectional approach so uh as dan mentioned bex also kind of uh has dual benefits uh because of its ability to draw down co2 and its ability to cut co2 underground it has this carbon removal value but it can also be used to produce these additional electricity heat or fuel or other cleantech products so it it also has an energy value and that puts it at a very interesting techno economic as well as climate space where as a carbon removal solution it is cheaper and uh much more uh deployable uh than uh um some uh engineered approaches like direct air capture which is pretty expensive um but as an energy production method it is more expensive than renewables but also offers uh some climate benefits compared to fossil fuels so um the value system that we have right now kind of puts it at a very complex um landscape uh bex is also a multi-sectoral industry uh because it involves the full supply chain of not just you know where the biomass is sourced from but includes harvesting and transportation and converting that into different end uses as well as geologic storage it involves multiple industries of course agriculture and forestry being kind of key drivers of the feedstock and transportation which includes both land and maritime because we do have biomass shipping um to uk and other places in europe uh geologic storage industries also quite important when thinking about uh and then of course because of its end uses for energy for fuel for other heavy industry um and of course uh because it has the potential to remove co2 there's also emission credits that can be um traded or um uh because of this range of industries that it touches it is also a multi-uh stakeholder space um and of course um we see that in we see that it has different impacts on those who own land and those who don't um it also interacts with natural ecosystems because the production of biomass could involve different types of additives like fertilizers and um and other things um that affect other natural existing ecosystems um it also uh impacts workers that produce and process um uh biomass so agricultural and forestry workers are also impacted by vex deployment um and of course proximal communities but but because it is a multi-supply chain system uh communities uh that are near uh biomass sourcing harvesting transporting and actual conversion and geologic storage sites could look different so it affects different communities um differently um of course as sam mentioned there's also local air quality uh concerns which brings in a different state uh set of stakeholders as well as the global climate benefits that can be reached from deploying such a technology uh last but not least of course investors and and developers are also involved and we need um uh we need capital to flow in to deploy such a new um and nasa technology uh bex of course also lies in a myriad of social and political um intersections uh i'm sure i will not touch on all of them um but just to kind of call them out there's a significant sort of urban and ruler divide when thinking about vex deployment a lot of the biomass resources are located in rural communities and therefore their processing their harvesting has to be located in rural communities but some of the benefits can span to urban populations so there's a divide divide as well as a differentiated stakeholder there and as sam mentioned it does present significant ruler development economic opportunities because of the job losses that we've seen um for a lot of rural or communities best also has uh especially as a carbon removal solution there's a balance that needs to be weighed the risk and benefit balance that needs to be weighed um and that shows up differently so um it could be uh there's some diffused local and direct benefits but globally uh obviously there's there could be significant climate benefits as well so balancing all those kind of competing factors um and investments and and costs um and especially in terms of thinking about who pays that cost is going to be really essential of course uh last but definitely not least is um there's been various uh government and private actors historically that have caused um harm and environmental justice issues are also pretty central to thinking about vex and biomass resources and so dealing with those and confronting those both historically as well as in our current uh approach to deploy this technology is gonna be essential so when we're thinking about this kind of uh approach of like what does it mean to meaningfully deploy a technology such as backside i kind of think about these four set of questions um and the question is uh for whom are we trying to deploy that uh for what uh at what scale and how um and i think um the some of the panelists have touched on and some of the aspects of this but we try to kind of approach that in an intersectional way because the solutions don't just lie in one space so the solutions are going to involve both the environment balancing both the environmental the social economical as well as the technical aspects of bex and um we kind of see it as these uh intersections lying in the sphere in the political sphere and therefore we we see that policy has a really meaningful uh role to play in deploying and meaningfully deploying backs so to that effect um i had a really great opportunity last year to kind of think about this kind of multi-dimensional approach to a multi-dimensional technology and we were able to develop a framework or what i will call a scorecard that has four aspects and so the first one is um sustainability this is the involves the production and the uh processing of um the biomass and that it's be sustainably sourced as well as uh produced of course this cannot come at the cost of existing ecosystems or loss of any natural ecosystems uh the second dimension that we really want to prioritize because biomass as well as backs can have a different set of values um but we felt like prioritizing that negative emission through robust carbon accounting through near-term deployment and really prioritizing approaches that ensure net carbon removal to be pretty important the third aspect is because the technology doesn't exist in a vacuum um the community well-being aspect of this technology is going to be really essential to meaningfully deploying it um local community impacts have to be considered the social and economic benefits that this brings has to be part of our our thinking from the get-go the last aspect really kind of tries to touch on who the players are in this space and how has it been done historically so historically there's been a lot of kind of um uh really uh maybe missed opportunities for communication harm associated with local deployment uh some discriminatory practices so there's really a need to rebuild that public trust especially when it comes to biomass and so we also proposed a few community engagement approaches uh to kind of round out the scorecard so this kind of uh multi-multi-dimensional framework uh can really also be applied um it can be applied to both evaluate projects um as well as uh develop policies so um just to give you a flavor of just a few policies that i think can touch upon these multiple dimensions uh one uh one that's been brought up a couple of times is this life cycle accounting a standardized way of accounting for the full life cycle of biomass we think that this has net sustainability benefits net negative emission benefits as well as um community benefits and uh builds trust in partnerships because there's been a lot of kind of loss of trust when it comes to that um we uh we have also um the bipartisan policy center has recently also uh came out with a a couple of reports that recommend uh targeted technical assistance for disadvantaged landowners and producers uh this has really meaningful impacts for especially for our minoritized um landowners uh black and brown land owners to really build community well-being while simultaneously reaping climate benefits we also think that supporting near-term win-win opportunities by prioritizing waste biomass is another winner and touches on these multiple aspects of x um just to name a little bit more we also need to really develop long-term sustainable feedstock supply chains this is critical for supporting rural communities but it's also critical to ensuring sustainability of of resources and providing technical assistance uh to communicate not just the risks and benefits of backs but all carbon removal solutions can really build that trust piece that i kept mentioning um and then last but definitely not least um we certainly have more um but some supporting uh emerging uh markets um and innovative products um can also be a really near near-term win that has net negative emission benefits while also building community economic well-being um so i will just stop there and express my gratitude to uh bipartisan policy center uh some of the recommendations i draw are from our team um and um most of this work i also developed at carbon 180 through various conversations with practitioners advocates and technical experts um and so um this is kind of our working and evolving understanding and i welcome and me i also have my contact and if you would like to read more about what i talked about here um i've also added the links thank you very much great thank you mero um all right audience members please do keep those questions coming in through the q and a feature um the first question i'm going to put to our panelists comes from actually a couple of questions in the q a there's some questions about carbon accounting at the archer daniels midland beck's facility in illinois which both dan and sam mentioned [Music] part of the question is whether there is a publicly available life cycle carbon accounting for that facility that's been published and if so where can we find it and relatedly um i'll just quote directly from the question here i think because it also points to some of the uh trust issues that maron mentioned quote as of the most recent publicly available data from 2020 uh the facility was only capturing about 500 000 tons a year uh and you'll remember that dan said it's uh claims to be one million tons quote is there any evidence or data which indicates that it's anywhere close to meeting the goal of one megaton per year so it's a two-part question from two people is there a report about the carbon accounting for that facility if so where can we find it and is there evidence or data that it will actually reach the one megaton per year claim great well i can uh try to get started um on on that um yeah you know we should be really we should be really clear here um that dex is not always net negative and particularly in the case of corn ethanol um that's going to be an issue that comes up again and again um you can reduce the life cycle carbon impact of kind of conventional corn ethanol by about 30 to 40 percent um by capturing the fermentation co2 emissions and putting them underground but the life cycle emissions of growing corn harvesting corn transporting it to a facility running a corn ethanol production facility and getting it into a car exceed those um the co2 the biogenic co2 that is captured and sequestered um and so it is a a low carbon fuel it's not a zero carbon fuel and it's not a it's not a net negative fuel um and you know i think that often gets conflated here if we use lignocellulosic biomass particularly waste and residues where we're more conf where we're confident it's a very low carbon feedstock um x is a net negative technology and i think that really that that often does get conflated um regarding maggie's question um this actually wasn't something that i was wasn't a was aware of um i would say that 500 000 tons a year um feels close to meeting the goal of 1 million tons per year to me i'm i think it's great they're capturing co2 and they've managed to deploy this technology um and that they're that they're you know measurably and verifiably putting co2 underground and complying with you know epa regulations to do so um i don't know about their progress to meet the million tons per year goal that was that was based off of engineering estimates um quite frankly you know the the time i really focused on this project was a few years ago when it was scaling up from um the illinois base indicator project to the illinois industrial ccs project and there was uh extra money coming in from the us department of energy then and a million ton uh co2 per year goal in terms of where that data is available um you know i haven't looked closely at like ir uh like irs filings or many of the information about 45q compliance um it's one place to look but uh i don't know if other folks have thoughts yeah i think uh i'll jump in on that so on the question of of finding data first i don't know about a life cycle analysis i do know that the data about that 500 000 tons is comes from the greenhouse gas reporting program from epa so they're required to uh report how much they sequester underground but that doesn't get to the whole life cycle emissions of their process um and i think that the other thing that's important to remember with an early project like this is it's got other value beyond um sort of getting to that carbon negative point um first of all like dan said it's decarbonizing their existing process at the adm plant you know reducing their their emissions there um the other thing that it's useful for is the the innovation value of being a first of a kind project that's really trying to capture biogenic carbon at this scale and sequester it and there's a lot of value from from that from the learning that can happen from that process the other thing i'll say on accounting is that uh as you know as helpful as it is to pursue this project level accounting the accounting questions also go beyond that it gets to how do you account this in national level state level inventories how do you sort of make these broad level policy decisions about accounting not just on the level of an individual project anything to add there all right uh i want to move on to a a set of questions that's related to a point that both you brought up which is about the type of feedstock the type of biomass that's going into bex i'll bundle a few questions together here one i'll just quote because i like the way it's put isn't cutting down trees not really good for the environment right so there's questions about wood as a feedstock for biomass there are also questions about ocean biomass there's some discussion about ocean-based cdr including a recent report from the national academies about it and so what if anything is the connection between ocean biomass and bex and finally a question about municipal waste right organic waste from households businesses and so on so i would invite uh anywhere all of you to comment on the significance of different feedstocks and in particular wood ocean biomass and municipal waste so uh i can jump in to start here i'm sure dan will probably make some of the similar points in part because i've been really uh dependent on the research that he's done on some of these questions um to answer the trees question first sometimes it it is good for the environment to cut down trees in particular in the west there's a lot of overstocked forests uh where better management can help reduce wildfire risk so that presents an opportunity to for low value biomass that can be put towards specs in addition even in other circumstances uh the these plantations for example in the south that are growing biomass for energy uh do practice you know restoring the forest as they are going through they're managing the forest to promote carbon uptake uh and and to provide other benefits um and they're they're planting trees as they go along however there is this question of temporal scales this is part of the equi the accounting questions of uh you you have a lot of carbon that you may be uh releasing or removing from storage and just planting a tree doesn't necessarily provide a one-to-one substitute uh on the ocean's question um the that's certainly something people are looking into there's both an opportunity to grow biomass for use in a bex process whether it be algae uh macroalgae like kelper or microalgae this is something in efi's first bex report that we recommended in terms of an r d need uh actually both of our both clearing the air and and our oceans report and our back support i'll talk about this r d need uh there's also biomass based carbon removal options that don't have an energy component that you can explore in the ocean context and then finally on municipal waste so there's a couple of different things in there first of all municipal there's urban wood waste so opportunities from construction materials or other things to provide wood waste that can go into a wood burning process that would be another more sustainable source of wood hopefully not in all circumstances but also the opportunities to just sort of have uh waste to energy incineration with carbon capture i know that's something that's being talked about it's there's a couple of demonstrations scale plants for example one in japan and one in the netherlands i believe that are pursuing this but uh waste energy and incinerators have their own set of community and local air pollution impacts that you have to be really careful of so it's something that's on the table but raises its own set of concerns anyone want to add anything to that i think that was a great answer sam encyclopedic if uh if possible um i think with all of these you know there's there's there's an ecosystem management context that is tremendously local um and there is a um an important um related question about whether or not this biomass is classified as a waste or not more residue and those those really intersect and i spend most of my time thinking about you know those contexts trying to understand when we're dealing with waste biomass or whether they're alternative markets what are the counterfactual uses here um is the biomass that is being sourced you know truly a waste or a residue or is it actually a byproduct or even a driver of land management if that biomass does drive land management uh is that something that is ecologically and socially sound um i think it involves talking to to locals and and talking to uh to experts people like your local forester turns out there are people in cooperative extension whose job it is to really understand these local forest management contexts all across the us and so um the same thing extends to waste management and agriculture and uh i wish we we knew more about oceans as well all right then uh let me turn to an issue that sam had brought up right at the end because it dovetails nicely with some other questions here about uh local pollution from or related to bex so the more general version is about burning biomass you might also ask about other other sources of local pollution but what other emissions are created and what happens to those other emissions that you might think of that both as greenhouse gas and you know other local air pollutants um and then uh there's also a question about pollution from paper and pulp uh manufacturing which dan had mentioned and so you might focus on particular industries too and uh maron since you know this is something that you've worked on a lot in my you invite you to go first thanks um yeah i think thinking about the local pollution um angle of beck's uh especially thinking about um local processing of wood wood waste into wood pellets it's been a pretty kind of divisive issue area also impacting local communities uh because um prior to actually using it in um a utility facility or uh or a bex facility uh wood has to be processed dried and processed and during that process it can release a particulate matter and that particular matter can really impact local air quality um and then of course when using these biomass sources especially with traditional combustion um conversion technologies uh you could also have other uh knocks and socks emissions that could also impact uh local communities and uh that's partly you know partly the reason why the focus does need to be carbon removal um because um the traditional ways that we use uh biomass resources in the past has shown that there's these additional emissions that if not mitigated or if um practitioners or government regulations don't really control these uh additional emissions that they can impact local communities um and so some of that divide uh really exists when we go from like sort of thinking about ideally what can that technology do and then once we deploy it uh what the sort of um uh challenges could be so um making sure um to to mitigate those harms will be important of course um i should also mention if biomass is being transported from uh harvesting and processing locations to conversion facilities there's also additional emissions that can come from that and there are ways to mitigate that whether that is by using cleaner transportation methods or by reducing the amount of distance that can uh that the resource can be transported there are many ways but i think the the the honesty and also uh really the solution-oriented approaches is critical to to mitigate uh local um possible harms the one thing that that i want to add is is that um and that's you know that's all it's all consistent with what we've found in in our research as well one thing that people are investigating is whether adding carbon capture can actually help reduce the criteria pollutants knock stocks pm from combustion facilities because there's some evidence that it can with natural gas with carbon capture but there isn't really good evidence yet on on back so people are looking into that question of whether the carbon capture can be part of the solution for these uh other pollutants yeah uh just just to underline that really great point um i think carbon capture and storage does have obviously benefits of capturing possible emissions and and putting them underground but these additive local benefits um are really like technology dependent it really depends on what kind of capture and storage that we use and it also depends on what processes these industries are putting in place to pre-clean um the technology um additionally of course different conversion technologies generate different um proportion of co2 or or relative purity of co2 uh during that conversion process so all of that detail matters and it definitely matters for local communities thanks we only have a few minutes left but maybe someone can quickly answer the following question about whether bex is mainly limited by the availability of suitable biomass or by the available capacity for geological storage and the point is put this way if we had unlimited biomass available could geological storage theoretically absorb a trillion tons of co2 so i'm not a geologist but i definitely talk to a lot of them and they seem as a community quite sure that there is there is adequate storage underground for um very very large volumes of co2 just like we have very very large volumes of fossil fuel reserves that are still uh you know undug and unburned um it seems like there is a lot of space there i think the amount of you know sustainable biomass and what is sustainable biomass as a frock question but um is uh is the primary limiting factor um of the overall technical potential of this industry um but uh you know we can be confident that maybe that gets us to a billion tons of year of carbon removal um but it maybe doesn't get us to the 10 billion tons that was in the ipcc reports before and the you know the i think it was eight that sam highlighted by 2050 um it's you know it's it's small it's definitely smaller than and it's definitely smaller than once envisioned and um limited by sustainable biomass but still hopefully an important part of the climate change mitigation portfolio i'd agree with dan 100 but in and especially on the macro level but in the near term um there's perhaps a bigger issue with geological storage which is just the amount of transport storage and injection infrastructure um could can really be an impediment to near-term deployment even more so than than getting the biomass because we have the biomass supply chain set up already maroon anything to add i could give you the last word here oh thank you i concur i guess but i think for me it ultimately comes down to regional um you know we don't want to transport biomass for long distances we lose a lot of carbon removal as well as energy potential when we do so it really uh instead of uh globally designing such a system the regional uh and specifics and the regional um you know characteristics are going to matter more um so i i've started just to kind of stop thinking globally when it comes to biomass all right well that just about brings us to the end of our hour so i want to thank all three of our expert panelists again thanks to all of you for attending and for your questions this webinar has been recorded so if you've missed some of it or want to go back and review the presentations again we will post it on our website by usually the end of the week and you can find it at carbonremoval.info and you can follow us and all of our panelists on twitter to get more information about bec's carbon removal and related subjects have a good afternoon morning evening wherever you are
2022-04-04