2024-11-05 09:44 | By Comité Schone Lucht, Tijdschrift Milieu, 5 november 2024.  

“Biomass for energy: a good idea?” That was the subject of the Tijdschrift Milieu (no. 4, Sept. 2024). The aim was to list facts and views on biomass.

Response to article in magazine Milieu

“Biomass for energy: a good idea?” That was the subject of the Tijdschrift Milieu (no. 4, Sept. 2024). The aim was to list facts and views on biomass. At the request of the editors, we submitted two articles (1). To our surprise, it turned out that, in addition to our contributions, a review by Junginger and Van Soest was also chosen upon publication. In this, the contributions that are critical of biomass are assessed as factually incorrect. Following our request to the editors, we were still given the opportunity to write a response, in the context of hearing both sides of the story.

Biomass leads to deforestation, forest degradation and drying up of carbon reservoir

In our articles, we showed, using sources, that the biomass that is burned for energy production is not just waste, but is largely manufactured by cutting down forests. We also showed that this causes additional CO2 emissions that are not compensated for by the growth of new trees in the foreseeable future. We showed the large-scale forest degradation worldwide that the systematic, industrial logging of forests for wood pellets leads to. As well as the sharp decline in biodiversity and drying up of the carbon reservoir of forest areas in the countries of origin of biomass. We based these conclusions on references to independent scientists and institutions such as the European Academies of Sciences (EASAC, 2), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 3), the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency (4), the SER advice on biomass and many hundreds of scientists from the Netherlands and abroad.

Facts, without opinion or interest

Junginger and Van Soest do not address the scientific facts, namely that burning wood emits more CO2 than burning coal and that even when planting new trees, that extra CO2 remains in the atmosphere for another fifty to a hundred years. They dismiss this as an ‘opinion of their own’ and ‘agenda-setting’, while these facts are self-evident to anyone with sufficient chemical and biological knowledge. This does not bring the reader any closer to the truth.

The carbon myth in relation to time

Junginger and Van Soest state that the CO2 that is released all at once during wood combustion was stored in the wood in the past. That is not relevant; even coal was once stored by plant growth. What matters is that CO2 emissions in the atmosphere are now increasing due to large-scale forest and clear-cutting and industrial wood combustion for energy. The carbon that was stored is burned and thus causes a CO2 debt with a mortgage for the future. If the forests had not been cut down, they would have retained their CO2 for decades and stored extra CO2. This fact is ignored, but is crucial. It takes many decades for the CO2 released by burning trees to be stored again by the growth of new, mature trees. However, we do not have that luxury of time!

Why is BECCS scientifically proven?

Van Soest and Junginger advocate the combination of biomass combustion with CO2 capture and storage, abbreviated in English as BECCS (Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage). They state that “all IPCC studies show that the BECCS option is certainly climate negative, and that anyone who claims otherwise is doing climate policy a disservice”. However, those IPCC reports (5) themselves already indicate the many objections to BECCS. Attempts to store CO2 from power station chimneys underground have failed for 25 years (6). In addition, growing biomass for BECCS requires immense amounts of land and therefore competes with agriculture and nature reserves. Even the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) now indicates that CO2 capture during biomass combustion is not effective and is therefore not recommended. In the Netherlands, the discussion about biomass culminated in the SER advice of 2020. The conclusion was that bio-based raw materials are scarce; they should not be burned for energy but used for high-quality purposes. Even though the (biobased) industry would logically like to see it differently, that message holds water.

Biodiversity not subordinate

Finally, we are not only dealing with a climate crisis. Even more threatening is the global rapid loss of biodiversity and well-functioning ecosystems on which all life on this planet – and more than half of our global economy – depends. We solve the climate and nature crises together, or we solve neither. Restoring biodiversity is essential in itself to absorb and store more carbon. The low-value use of wood for energy requires an enormous amount of land that cannot be used for food or nature. The increasing conversion of biodiverse forests and semi-natural grasslands into intensively managed ‘forest fields’ is disastrous for biodiversity. Fortunately, this realization has reached the vast majority of international scientists. Now it is Junginger and Van Soest.

References

1. Swart and Visschers (2024), ‘Wood combustion for energy is the cart behind the horse’. Milieu 2024-4, p.15-17 (https://comiteschonelucht.nl/paard-achter-de-wagen/ );
Vet and Katan (2024) ‘Woody biomass for energy: a good idea? . Milieu 2024-4, p.10-11 (https://comiteschonelucht.nl/biomassa-voor-energie/ ).
2. https://easac.eu/
3. https://www.ipbes.net/
4. https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/scientific-committee/presentation-archived
5. IPCC 2018 ‘Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C’: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
Among others:
‘Large-scale deployment of CDR is unproven and reliance on such technology is a major risk to the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C.’ (p. 34);
‘Most CDR technologies are largely unproven to date and raise significant concerns about negative side effects on environmental and social sustainability’ (p. 121);
‘The use of BECCS is further limited by the carbon accounting, land, water and nutrient requirements of bioenergy’ (p. 343).
6. https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-learned