Delivering greenhouse gas emission savings through UK bioenergy value chains

Bioenergy can help significantly reduce the cost to UK consumers and taxpayers of meeting 2050 GHG emission reduction targets, especially when combined with CCS. The ETI’s analysis informed by ESME, an internationally peer-reviewed Energy System Modelling Environment, suggests that bioenergy can be deployed to deliver net negative GHG emissions of around -55 million tonnes of CO2 per year in the 2050s (approximately half our emissions target in 2050), and meet around 10% of UK future energy demand (~130 TWh/yr in 2050). Deployed properly, bioenergy has the potential to help secure energy supplies, mitigate climate change, and create significant green growth opportunities.

It is therefore important to understand fully the end-to-end elements across the bioenergy value chain: from crops and land use, to conversion of biomass to useful energy vectors, and the manner in which it is integrated into the rest of the UK energy system (e.g. into transport, heat or electricity).

This insights report presents the evolution of that work, incorporating data arising from the ELUM project on soil carbon changes to calculate dLUC emissions, and examining a) how material they are in UK bioenergy value chains, and b) identifying which UK value chains offer a significant opportunity to deliver GHG savings relative to fossil baselines.