New research from the Stockholm Environment Institute suggests there is huge untapped potential in biomass as a source of energy – but as Dr Eric Kemp-Benedict explains developing this will require careful planning and political will.
Climate change poses enormous challenges: to keep temperature increases under 2°C, we must dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and to do so, we will need to transform the world’s energy systems and wean our economies off fossil fuels.
This will be hard, and it will be costly, but it also creates extraordinary opportunities.
It’s a chance to innovate, to explore options we might’ve missed in times of cheap, plentiful coal and oil and no climate worries. And one of the things we’re discovering is the huge untapped potential of a resource we’ve used for millennia: biomass.
In many countries, coal-fired plants have been retrofitted to burn wood; in Sweden, biomass surpassed oil in 2009 as the No. 1 energy source. Developing nations such as India have focused on using biomass more cleanly and efficiently, making briquettes, for example, from agricultural and forestry wastes.
Most notably, we’ve seen a surge in production of liquid biofuels from sugarcane, maize and other sources. To the extent that these projects encourage deforestation, compete with food production, or deplete scarce water supplies, they’re unsustainable. But there are also great successes, especially with sugarcane, that could be widely emulated. The best projects don’t just make ethanol, but also use the fibrous residues to generate energy. Some are going one step farther, and making biogas, [...]
↧