New paper from Clair Gough and colleagues at the Tyndall Centre, University of Manchester

We’re delighted to share news from one of our core research team, Dr Clair Gough and colleagues Muir Freer, Andrew Welfle and Amanda Lea-Langton on their new paper “Putting Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage in a Spatial Context: What Should Go Where?”

The paper explores the implications of siting a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) facility for carbon emission performances for three case-study supply chains using the Carbon Navigation System (CNS) model. The supply chains they looked at were a wheat straw derived BECCS-power, a municipal solid waste derived BECCS-waste-to-energy and a sawmill residue derived BECCS-hydrogen.

A BECCS facility needs to be carefully sited, taking into consideration its local low carbon infrastructure, available biomass, and geography for successful deployment and achieving a favourable net-negative carbon balance. They found that on average, across the three supply chains a 10 km shift in the siting of the BECCS facility resulted in an 8.6–13.1% increase in spatially explicit supply chain emissions. BECCS facilities producing low purity CO₂ at high yields had lower spatial emissions when located within the industrial clusters, while those producing high purity CO₂ at low yields performed better outside the clusters.

The team also generated a map identifying which of the three modelled supply chains delivers the lowest spatially explicit supply chain emission options for any given area of the UK at a 1 MtCO₂/yr capture scale.

You can read the paper here: Putting Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage in a Spatial Context: What Should Go Where?