Engineering topics

House, Jo

Publications and source records attributed to House, Jo.

4 records

DOE OSTI2022

Corrigendum: A review of trends and drivers of greenhouse gas emissions by sector from 1990 to 2018 (2021 Environ. Res. Lett. 16 073005)

This corrigendum resolves an error in figure 17 and clarifies the scope of the cement sector in figure 2. Figure 17 in the original published manuscript depicts a Kaya identity for the agriculture, forestry and other land uses (AFOLU) sector. We unintentionally excluded land-use CO 2 emissions from total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in this identity, and depicted only agricultural GHG emissions.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2021

Bioenergy for climate change mitigation: Scale and sustainability

Many global climate change mitigation pathways presented in IPCC assessment reports rely heavily on the deployment of biomass for bioenergy, often used in conjunction with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). We review the literature on bioenergy, including the modelling of bioenergy in integrated assessment models (IAMs) and bottom-up modelling and non-modelling studies on the implications of bioenergy use. We summarise the limitations of existing modelling studies and what is known about the potential co-benefits and adverse side-effects of bioenergy systems. We find that the implications of bioenergy supply on mitigation and other sustainability criteria are context dependent and influenced by feedstock, management regime, climatic region, scale of deployment and the counterfactual land use and energy system. However, due to limitations of the existing models, and uncertainty over the future context with respect to the many variables that influence availability of biomass and land resources, it is not possible to precisely quantify the sustainability implications for different scales of bioenergy implementation. Given these uncertainties, the dependence on large-scale deployment of bioenergy in mitigation scenarios carries risks. The deployment of bioenergy technologies and the evolution of biomass supply chains at a scale that achieves significant mitigation and carbon sequestration requires integrative policies, coordinated institutions and improved governance mechanisms. As a result, bioenergy, and the use of land to produce biomass, is an essential part of many climate mitigation strategies but there are limits to its use due to trade-offs with sustainability.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

DOE OSTI2021

A review of trends and drivers of greenhouse gas emissions by sector from 1990 to 2018

Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be traced to five economic sectors: energy, industry, buildings, transport and AFOLU (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). In this topical review, we synthesize the literature to explain recent trends in global and regional emissions in each of these sectors. To contextualize our review, we present estimates of GHG emissions trends by sector from 1990 to 2018, describing the major sources of emissions growth, stability and decline across ten global regions. Overall, the literature and data emphasize that progress towards reducing GHG emissions has been limited. The prominent global pattern is a continuation of underlying drivers with few signs of emerging limits to demand, nor of a deep shift towards the delivery of low and zero carbon services across sectors. We observe a moderate decarbonization of energy systems in Europe and North America, driven by fuel switching and the increasing penetration of renewables. By contrast, in rapidly industrializing regions, fossil-based energy systems have continuously expanded, only very recently slowing down in their growth. Strong demand for materials, floor area, energy services and travel have driven emissions growth in the industry, buildings and transport sectors, particularly in Eastern Asia, Southern Asia and South-East Asia. An expansion of agriculture into carbon-dense tropical forest areas has driven recent increases in AFOLU emissions in Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa. Identifying, understanding, and tackling the most persistent and climate-damaging trends across sectors is a fundamental concern for research and policy as humanity treads deeper into the Anthropocene.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2021

Critical adjustment of land mitigation pathways for assessing countries' climate progress

Collective progress towards the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets will be assessed by the Agreement’s Global Stocktake process. Global emission pathways by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are a likely benchmark against which aggregated countries’ greenhouse gas mitigation pledges will be assessed. However, this approach requires comparability, which is currently hampered by a 5 GtCO2yr-1 mismatch between the estimated global land anthropogenic flux of IAMs and countries’ GHG inventories (GHGIs) for 2005-2015. We show that this gap is mostly the result of differences in how the anthropogenic forest sink is defined. Countries define managed forest more broadly than IAMs, and on this larger area typically consider anthropogenic also fluxes due to human-induced environmental change, which IAMs do not include their pathways. Using five IAMs and a dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM), we present and apply a novel method that adjusts IAM results to the countries’ definition, closing the gap with GHGIs at global and regional scale. When expressed in a way compatible with GHGIs, adjusted 1.5°C and well-below 2°C pathways have a cumulative CO2 balance until carbon neutrality that is 110–176 GtCO2 lower than the original IAMs pathways. The use of these country-compatible emission pathways under the Global Stocktake would therefore be essential for an accurate assessment of the collective progress towards the Paris Agreement’s climate goals.

Grassi, Giacomo↗