The role of biomass in China’s long-term mitigation toward the Paris climate goals

Abstract

Biomass is a crucial option of substituting fossil fuels to reduce emissions, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) allows for obtaining net-negative emissions. We explore the role of biomass in China's long-term mitigation toward the Paris climate goals in light of three narratives and five mitigation scenarios, modeling by a refined Global Change Assessment Model. While presenting a limited contribution to achieving China's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), biomass plays an important role in China's post-NDC mitigation toward the Paris climate goals. All the assessed scenarios call for extensive biomass use, accounting for 6.5%-28% of China's 2100 primary energy in our three 2°C scenarios and 15%-30% in our two 1.5°C scenarios. The exact biomass deployment trajectories tend to depend greatly on how China envisages national mitigation paces and BECCS strategies. For either 2°C or 1.5°C, a smaller negative-emission narrative, which means a more rapid immediate decarbonization of the energy system toward mid-century, depends on larger bioenergy in medium-to-long-term. Delaying short-and medium-term ambition delays bioenergy applications but requires far more in the second half of the century to create greater negative emissions via BECCS. Moving from 2°C toward 1.5°C features higher and earlier bioenergy deployments and meaningfully increasing BECCS volumes and biofuel shares in China's energy system. Consequently, the Chinese stockholders might be ready to make a decision on to what degree biomass and BECCS enter the sphere of China's energy and climate policies, which will greatly influence not only national biomass roadmap but also mid-century mitigation targets.

Spatially explicit analysis identifies significant potential for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage in China

“…We optimized the consumption of biomass for electricity generation in 2836 counties to achieve a target of national emission reduction, based on: (1) a life-cycle analysis of emissions and costs and (2) spatially explicit constraints on the supply of biomass feedstock, capacity for electricity generation, and capacity for geological carbon storage. Geographical logistical constraints in a large country like China have not been investigated at a county level for the full supply chain [1][2][3]11,23,25 . It allows us to compare the marginal costs of decarbonizing the power system by BECCS with bioenergy or CCS alone and to identify the major routes for biomass transportation.…”

Implications of near-term mitigation on China's long-term energy transitions for aligning with the Paris goals

“…At the global scope, a range of papers (e.g., Clarke et al, 2014 ; Pan et al, 2018a ; Rogelj et al, 2018 ) have highlighted that realizing Paris-aligned energy transitions relies on applying CCS and CDR to remove CO 2 emissions from the energy system. Besides a strong scaling-up of non-fossil energy, all our scenarios also feature an extensive and unavoidable requirement of CCS and CDR for China to realize its long-term energy transitions, as presented in Fig.…”

“…Based on Wang et al (2016) and Pan et al (2017) , the assumptions of other key parameters for China, such as demand-price elasticities and techno-economic parameters, are also updated to reflect the recent changes and polices in China. Some details of these parameters can be found in our recent papers (e.g., Pan et al, 2018 , Pan et al, 2018a ; Chen et al, 2019 ) (for the other 31 regions of the world, we maintain the default parameter assumptions in the standard GCAM). In our model, negative emissions of the energy system are achieved via BECCS which is the representation of CDR.…”

Comparison of China’s Biomass Combustion Power Generation with Different Installed Capacities

“…According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, to achieve global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, global bioenergy consumption in 2050 would have to nearly triple the level of 2018 [9]. In China, the share of biomass in primary energy mix might even reach as high as 10% in 2050 in order to limit climate warming to below 1.5 • C [10].…”