See the full analysis here.

The UK’s recently released Biomass Resource Model (BRM) reveals the government plans to meet the UK’s “net zero” target by massively increasing biomass imports, then adding carbon capture and storage (CCS) to biomass energy plants (BECCS) to achieve “negative emissions” (meaning actual removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere).

A new assessment by PFPI critiques the many unrealistic assumptions of the government’s plans. The assessment supports Lifescape’s legal case against the UK government, which challenges the government’s continued support for biomass combustion as irrational based on violation of IPCC greenhouse gas reporting guidance and common sense. Burning trees for energy isn’t carbon neutral, and BECCS using forest biomass won’t deliver negative emissions (see this explainer for why).

While the legal case focuses on forest biomass, which constitutes the vast majority of biomass currently burned in the UK, the government’s 2023 Biomass Strategy outlines plans for growing more biomass in the UK and importing a truly massive amount of energy crops and agricultural residues from overseas, as well as woody biomass.  The recently published Biomass Resource Model (BRM) lays out the details.

Perhaps the most shocking admission in the Biomass Strategy is the degree to which the government’s entire climate strategy relies on a massive increase in imports that is plainly unrealistic, and that even if realized, would not deliver “carbon neutral” biomass or “negative emissions” with BECCS.

The BRM models biomass availability under two scenarios – “restricted” and “ambitious” –  but as the Biomass Strategy admits, only the “ambitious” scenario allows the Government’s energy model to deliver net zero in 2050:

“Crucially, the restricted scenario sees the UK only have access to a total of around 500 PJ of sustainable biomass by 2050, which significantly reduces the amount of decarbonisation that is possible through deployment of biomass, with a particular reduction in the level of negative emissions achievable from BECCS. The impact of this is that our whole systems energy modelling (using UK TIMES, described in Chapter 5 and the Technical Annex) is no longer able to find a net zero solution for 2050, based on current demand and technology assumptions” (page 72 of Biomass Strategy; emphasis added)

(The UK TIMES model includes all energy flows, technologies, and emissions and is considered by its developers to underpin UK climate policy. The BRM is one of the inputs to the UK TIMES model.)

The BRM’s conclusions were greenlighted by the government and the model even underwent peer review.  However, it’s hard to understand how anyone could sign off on something that violates so many tenets of good practice for land use modeling, let alone common sense.

Read our assessment for the full story on what the BRM assumes regarding biomass imports, but here are some its more implausible conclusions:

• The UK will massively increase imports of biomass from countries labeled as “Other South Asia and Oceania”. That list includes a number of countries that seem improbable as sources of significant volumes of agricultural and forestry biomass, for example Afghanistan, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Maldives.
• Energy crop area will increase exponentially globally, and crop yields will increase by more than fifty percent. This is all against a background of increasing climate change when whole regions are facing famine due to weather-induced crop failures.
• Despite the massive increase in energy crops, there will be no direct land use change (DLUC: when forests are felled and replaced by crops) or indirect land use change (ILUC: when energy crops replace food crops, then forests are felled elsewhere to accommodate demand for food). And because the model assumes there is no DLUC or ILUC, it conveniently assumes the biomass has “zero” carbon emissions.
• Extensive infrastructure capable of harvesting, processing, and shipping millions of tonnes of biomass to the UK will spring up magically around the globe – despite the fact that currently, very little biomass is sourced from energy crops or agricultural residues, which are wet and dirty, and consequently, hard to process and burn.

Burning biomass won’t save the UK’s climate strategy. Nor will it move the country closer to net zero. The sooner policymakers come to grips with that reality, the sooner they can start focusing on real solutions.