Implications of climate change mitigation strategies on international bioenergy trade

Abstract

Most climate change mitigation scenarios rely on increased use of bioenergy to decarbonize the energy system. Here we use results from the 33rd Energy Modeling Forum study (EMF-33) to investigate projected international bioenergy trade for different integrated assessment models across several climate change mitigation scenarios. Results show that in scenarios with no climate policy, international bioenergy trade is likely to increase over time, and becomes even more important when climate targets are set. More stringent climate targets, however, do not necessarily imply greater bioenergy trade compared to weaker targets, as final energy demand may be reduced. However, the scaling up of bioenergy trade happens sooner and at a faster rate with increasing climate target stringency. Across models, for a scenario likely to achieve a 2 °C target, 10–45 EJ/year out of a total global bioenergy consumption of 72–214 EJ/year are expected to be traded across nine world regions by 2050. While this projection is greater than the present trade volumes of coal or natural gas, it remains below the present trade of crude oil. This growth in bioenergy trade largely replaces the trade in fossil fuels (especially oil) which is projected to decrease significantly over the twenty-first century. As climate change mitigation scenarios often show diversified energy systems, in which numerous world regions can act as bioenergy suppliers, the projections do not necessarily lead to energy security concerns. Nonetheless, rapid growth in the trade of bioenergy is projected in strict climate mitigation scenarios, raising questions about infrastructure, logistics, financing options, and global standards for bioenergy production and trade.

Assessment of carbon dioxide removal potentialviaBECCS in a carbon-neutral Europe

“…This in turn would require a rapid growth in international trade of bio-energy -raising questions about global standards for bio-energy production, logistics and infrastructure. 71 The European target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 is very ambitious and requires urgent actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate residual ones. While European geological storage resources for CO 2 are more than sufficient to meet CCS requirements under net-zero emission scenarios, 72 the development of European-wide CO 2 transport networks remains a technical, social, political and economic challenge.…”

Bioenergy-induced land-use change emissions with sectorally fragmented policies

“…Table 1 for a description of the tax levels). In addition, we explore scenarios, in which we impose a ban on bioenergy imports on top of the different bioenergy tax levels (bioTaxNoImp10-50), since a considerable amount of biomass can be consumed in regions other than the one where it is produced 47 . In particular, exports from tropical regions with high carbon stocks might promote additional LUC.…”

Bioenergy for climate change mitigation: Scale and sustainability

“…Behavioural processes and other institutional aspects are rarely included in land use models and IAMs (Brown et al, 2017) and hence these models and scenarios may overestimate the possible rate of bioenergy deployment (Brown et al, 2019). In addition, such rapid expansion of bioenergy production could have implications for international supply chains, logistics and the risk of GHG emission leakage (Daioglou, Muratori, et al, 2020; Junginger et al, 2019). Moreover, bioenergy provision under politically unstable and/or weak governance conditions may also be a problem (Englund & Berndes, 2016; Erb et al, 2012; Searle & Malins, 2014).…”