To lessen climate change, scientists have come to the consensus that we need to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 and have zero net emissions by 2050. Not only will we have to reduce emissions, we will have to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. How will we do this? Organizations have looked to bioenergy.
So what is bioenergy? The Wikipedia definition states bio energy is renewable energy made available from materials derived from biological sources. These materials are called biomass and include wood and grown energy crops. Scientists hope to use biomass to produce electricity and heat and capture carbon. Companies that burn biomass and store the CO2 are called BECCs. Some climate plans are hopeful that BECCs could combat emissions from fossil fuels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted “that BECCs could sequester 0.4 billion to 11.3 billion tons a year.”
There’s a big problem though. Building these BECCs will take a lot of land- from 300 million to 700 million hectares of land. The entire continent of Australia is 769 million hectares. Not to mention that we need that land for agriculture or forests (which are important for biodiversity). There simply isn’t enough land to go around.
We can still look to BECCs as potential solutions for climate change, but we’re going to have to find a way to take up less space. One way Scientific American brings up is to reduce consumption. By reducing consumption through recycling and using leftovers will in turn reduce the demand from plantations and farms.
Farms are also coming up with ways to produce biomass without taking away from food production. Silvopastures in Latin America plant shrubs close together and fast growing trees far apart to allow livestock to have space to graze. Evergreen energy, which is being used in Sri Lanka and developed in Africa, uses the same land to produce wood and food. Shrubs fertilize the soil and feed livestock and then are harvested at the end of the season for their wood.
There’s still a long way to go, but if countries keep experimenting we could find the ideal solution that gives us sustainable energy and enough food to go around.
Source
Toensmeier, Eric, and Dennis Garrity. “The Biomass Bottleneck.” Scientific American , Aug. 2020.