Forest bioenergy – key research

In 2009, an article in the journal Science by Timothy Searchinger et al, identified a ‘major, but fixable, carbon accounting flaw in assessing bioenergy’ in the Kyoto Protocol and national climate legislation. ‘This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral, regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions, despite its causing large releases of carbon.’

In 2011, former IPCC lead author, Professor Bill Moomaw, wrote his warning letter to policymakers, “The Myth of Carbon Neutrality of Biomass”.

In January 2018, as the EU was reassessing the renewable energy directive which had led to a huge increase in the amount of wood being burned for energy, a group of 772 scientists wrote a letter to MEPs, as the European Parliament scrutinised the sustainability criteria for bioenergy as part of the EU’s recast Renewable Energy Directive. The list was headed by Professor John Beddington, former Chief Scientist to the UK government. When the Renewable Energy Directive passed the European Parliament in 2018, Tim Searchinger and a number of other leading scientists published a critical commentary in Nature Communications. They concluded that:

“Overall, replacing fossil fuels with wood will likely result in 2-3x more carbon in the atmosphere in 2050 per gigajoule of final energy.”

Dr Mary Booth’s paper in Environmental Research Letters (“Not carbon neutral: Assessing the net emissions impact of residues burned for bioenergy”) can be accessed here. Details of the case that Booth and others brought against the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive in 2020 can be found here. The accompanying report, “Paper Tiger”, can be read here.

In September 2019, the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), which includes the national science academies of 18 European countries, published a landmark paper arguing that ‘Serious mismatches continue between science and policy in forest bioenergy’. This was on top of a 2018 commentary on “Forest Bioenergy and Carbon Neutrality”. Ahead of the COP25 meeting in Madrid in December 2019, EASAC scientists issued a further statement to policymakers: ‘We have repeatedly pointed out that in many cases the large-scale substitution of coal by forest biomass will accelerate climate warming.’ In May 2020, EASAC issued a further statement in response to complaints by a body representing the bioenergy industry. And in August 2020, EASAC issued a recommendation to the European Commission that biomass burning be included in the EU ETS (Emissions Trading System).

In 2018, Forest Research, the UK’s principal organization for forestry and tree related research published a supplementary analysis based on research complied for the European Commission: “Carbon impacts of biomass consumed in the EU”.  The report modelled several scenarios for the EU. The authors stated that:

‘Unless appropriate policy measures are taken to support sustainable bioenergy supply (in terms of impacts on GHG emissions), particularly in the case of forest bioenergy supply, a significant increase in bioenergy use in the EU is likely to lead to a net increase, rather than decrease, in GHG emissions being contributed from bioenergy sources.’

In 2017, Chatham House, in the UK, published a series research papers on Woody Biomass for Power and Heat: Impacts on the Global Climate. The reports highlighted the dangers of expanding wood burning in Europe and pointed out the flaws in assuming that forest bioenergy is carbon neutral: ‘Replacing large mature trees, with plentiful leaf cover absorbing large volumes of carbon dioxide, with small young ones mean that the rate of carbon uptake will be far lower for years’. You can read a blog by the author, Duncan Brack, here. You can watch a debate on the findings on the UK’s Channel 4 News.

In January 2020, Chatham House also published a briefing paper and video on Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). The paper found that “the deployment of BECCS at the scales assumed in most models would consume land on a scale comparable to half that currently taken up by global cropland”. This chimes with warnings from researchers at Imperial Collage London in January 2019 that “policy makers should be sceptical about a future that is uniquely or heavily reliant on BECCS”.

Coal-to-Clean think tank Ember (formally Sandbag) has produced two reports into forest bioenergy since December 2019. “Playing with Fire”, which examines the threat of coal-to-biomass switching and found manifold plans from coal-plant owners in Europe, can be found here. Approximately 2,700km2 of forest would need to be cut down every year to feed this new demand if coal power plants are converted to burn biomass on this scale.

Ember’s second report, “The Burning Question”, which calculates the loss of revenue to the UK government from not applying a carbon price to UK biomass burning can be found here. UK taxpayers have committed in excess of £13 billion to large-scale biomass burning up to 2027, the report finds.

In 2017, the World Resources Institute published a blog on “Why Burning Trees for Energy Harms the Climate”

Official Publications

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2006). “Table 2,” Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Vol. 2 (Energy), pp 2.16-2.17. Available online at: https://tinyurl.com/wbprapcpublic/2006gl/vol2.html
• Verbruggen, A., W. Moomaw, J. Nyboer, 2011: Annex I: Glossary, Acronyms, Chemical Symbols and Prefixes. In IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation. P.958 – hyperlink

Forest Research

(2018) – Clarification report for the European Climate Foundation, based on research for the European Commission. “Carbon Impacts of Biomass consumed in the EU”.

UK Committee on Climate Change

• January 2020 – Land use: Policies for a Net Zero UK
• May 2019 – Net Zero Technical Report
• November 2018 – Biomass in a low-carbon economy
• December 2018 – Bioenergy Call for Evidence report
• December 2018 – Steps to scaling up UK sustainable bioenergy supply (technical annex)
• December 2018 – What next for bioenergy? (technical annex)

European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC)

May 2017 – Multi-functionality and Sustainability in the European Union’s Forests

Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL)

July 2020 – Availability and applications of sustainable biomass (English)

Landmark study by the Dutch Environment Agency based on plans by the Netherlands government to develop a “widely supported sustainability framework for biomass”. To this end, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management asked the advice of the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands (SER). In this context, PBL was asked to provide an estimate of the availability and optimal use of sustainable biomass for the Netherlands. The study called into question the viability and sustainability of biomass imports into the Netherlands.

You can read a response to the PBL study by Tim Searchinger, Michael Norton, Mary Booth and William Moomaw here.