Bioenergy and Climate Change Mitigation: An Assessment
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09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
Engineering topics
Faaij, Andre
Publications and source records attributed to Faaij, Andre.
Chapter 9, Land and Bioenergy in Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), Bioenergy & Sustainability: bridging the gaps.
In this chapter we address the questions of whether and how enough biomass could be produced to make a material contribution to global energy supply on a scale and timeline that is consistent with prominent low carbon energy scenarios. We assess whether bioenergy provision necessarily conflicts with priority ecosystem services including food security for the world s poor and vulnerable populations. In order to evaluate the potential land demand for bioenergy, we developed a set of three illustrative scenarios using specified growth rates for each bioenergy sub-sector. In these illustrative scenarios, bioenergy (traditional and modern) increases from 62 EJ/yr in 2010 to 100, 150 and 200 EJ/yr in 2050. Traditional bioenergy grows slowly, increasing by between 0.75% and 1% per year, from 40 EJ/yr in 2010 to 50 or 60 EJ/ yr in 2050, continuing as the dominant form of bioenergy until at least 2020. Across the three scenarios, total land demand is estimated to increase by between 52 and 200 Mha which can be compared with a range of potential land availability estimates from the literature of between 240 million hectares to over 1 billion hectares. Biomass feedstocks arise from combinations of residues and wastes, energy cropping and increased efficiency in supply chains for energy, food and materials. In addition, biomass has the unique capability of providing solid, liquid and gaseous forms of modern energy carriers that can be transformed into analogues to existing fuels. Because photosynthesis fixes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, biomass supply chains can be configured to store at least some of the fixed carbon in forms or ways that it will not be reemitted to the atmosphere for considerable periods of time, so-called negative emissions pathways. These attributes provide opportunities for bioenergy policies to promote longterm and sustainable options for the supply of energy for the foreseeable future.
Woods J, Lynd LR↗
Ligncellulosic feedstock supply systems with intermodal and overseas transportation
With growing demand for biomass from industrial uses and international trade, the logistic operations required to economically move the biomass from the field or forest to the end users have become increasingly complex. In addition to economics, understanding energy and GHG emissions is required to design cost effective, sustainable logistic process operations; in order to improve international supply chains it is also important to understate their interdependencies and related uncertainties. This article presents an approach to assess lignocellulosic feedstock supply systems at the operational level. For this purpose, the Biomass Logistic Model (BLM) has been linked with the Geographic Information Systems based Biomass Intermodal Transportation model (BIT-UU) and extended with inter-continental transport routes. Case studies of herbaceous and woody biomass, produced in the U.S. Midwest and U.S. Southeast, respectively, and shipped to Europe for conversion to Fischer-Tropsch (FT) diesel are included to demonstrate how intermodal transportation and, in particular, overseas shipping integrates with the bioenergy supply chains. For the cases demonstrated, biomass can be supplied at 99 € Mg-1 to 117 € Mg-1 (dry) and converted to FT-diesel at 19 € GJ-1 to 24 € GJ-1 depending on the feedstock type and location, intermediate (chips or pellets) and size of the FT-diesel production plant. With the flexibility to change the design of supply chains as well as input variables, many alternative supply chain cases can be assessed.
09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
Chapter 11: Renewable Energy
Renewable energy sources - including biomass, geothermal, ocean, solar, and wind energy, as well as hydropower - have a huge potential to provide energy services for the world. The renewable energy resource base is sufficient to meet several times the present world energy demand and potentially even 10 to 100 times this demand. This chapter includes an in-depth examination of technologies toconvert these renewable energy sources to energy carriers that can be used to fulfill our energy needs, including their installed capacity, the amount of energy carriers they produced in 2009, the current state of market and technology development, their economic and financial feasibility in 2009 and in the near future, as well as major issues they may face relative to their sustainability orimplementation.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗