The economic potential of bioenergy for climate change mitigation with special attention given to implications for the land system

By A. Popp, J. Dietrich, H. Lotze-Campen, David Klein, Nico Bauer, M. Krause, T. Beringer, Dieter Gerten, Ottmar Edenhofer. 2011

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biomass from cellulosic bioenergy crops is expected to play a substantial role in future energy systems, especially if climate policy aims at stabilizing greenhouse gas concentration at low levels. However, the potential of bioenergy for climate change mitigation remains unclear due to large uncertainties about future agricultural yield improvements and land availability for biomass plantations. This letter, by applying a modelling framework with detailed economic representation of the land and energy sector, explores the cost-effective contribution of bioenergy to a low-carbon transition, paying special attention to implications for the land system. In this modelling framework, bioenergy competes directly with other energy technology options on the basis of costs, including implicit costs due to biophysical constraints on land and water availability. As a result, we find that bioenergy from specialized grassy and woody bioenergy crops, such as Miscanthus or poplar, can contribute approximately 100 EJ in 2055 and up to 300 EJ of primary energy in 2095. Protecting natural forests decreases biomass availability for energy production in the medium, but not in the long run. Reducing the land available for agricultural use can partially be compensated for by means of higher rates of technological change in agriculture. In addition, our trade-off analysis indicates that forest protection combined with large-scale cultivation of dedicated bioenergy is likely to affect bioenergy potentials, but also to increase global food prices and increase water scarcity. Therefore, integrated policies for energy, land use and water management are needed.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Biomedical Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a765d91a1f9c812c32da723a0e3b69ead59ae42

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Citations in the corpus

Bioenergy in energy transformation and climate management (2014, background): “To date, a variety of individual studies have reported on large-scale bioenergy deployment in climate management scenarios (e.g., Wise et al. 2009; Rose et al. 2012; Reilly et al. 2012; Popp et al. 2011; van Vuuren et al. 2010).”
Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects (2018, background): “Although many studies apply a food-first principle to limit deployment, increased land competition could lead to increased global food prices (Popp et al 2011, Reilly et al 2012) and regional resource shortages (Müller et al 2008).”
Land-use futures in the shared socio-economic pathways (2017, methodology): “…been applied to derive a quantitative description of the storylines, namely AIM (Fujimori et al., 2014, 2016), GCAM (Wise et al., 2014), IMAGE (Stehfest et al., 2014), MESSAGE-GLOBIOM (Kindermann et al., 2006; Havlík et al., 2014; Riahi et al., 2012) and REMIND/MAgPIE (Popp et al., 2011, 2014).”
Woody biomass energy potential in 2050 (2014, background): “13 Other studies that consider the market potential of energy wood (Raunikar et al., 2010; van Vuuren et al., 2009; Popp et al., 2011; Favero and Mendelsohn, 2013) do not provide sufficient information about increments, yields and areas, which makes any relevant comparison impossible.”
Investigating afforestation and bioenergy CCS as climate change mitigation strategies (2014, background): “In the literature, studies focus on the standalone mitigation potential of bioenergy CCS (Azar et al 2010, Popp et al 2011, Klein et al 2014, Kriegler et al 2013, Vuuren et al 2013) and afforestation (Strengers et al 2008, Reilly et al 2012) or investigate both at the same time (Wise et al 2009,…”
Fossil-fueled development (SSP5): An energy and resource intensive scenario for the 21st century (2017, unknown): “The SSP5 marker scenario was developed with the REMIND-MAgPIE integrated assessment modeling framework (Popp et al., 2011; Bauer et al., 2014).”
The effect of bioenergy expansion: Food, energy, and environment (2014, background): “infrastructure developments, in particular a pipeline network similar to the existing gas transport infrastructure, and new storage capacities [27].”
Land‐use change trajectories up to 2050: insights from a global agro‐economic model comparison (2014, background): “Popp et al. (2011) show that protecting natural forests does not decrease biomass availability for energy production, if the reduction in available agricultural land is compensated by higher rates of TC.”
Land-use transition for bioenergy and climate stabilization: model comparison of drivers, impacts and interactions with other land use based mitigation options (2014, methodology): “…production leads to N2O emissions from fertilization but improved agricultural management (such as precision farming) increases the efficiency of nitrogen application and therefore reduces agricultural N2O emissions from both crop and bioenergy crop production (see also Popp et al. 2011b).”
Agricultural Adaptation to Climate Change in Rich and Poor Countries: Current Modeling Practice and Potential for Empirical Contributions (2012, background): “MAgPIE computes changes in crop area/location based on a global cost minimization objective function, which is constrained by resource availability at the grid cell, as well as national self-sufficiency goals.”
Exploring SSP land-use dynamics using the IMAGE model: Regional and gridded scenarios of land-use change and land-based climate change mitigation (2018, unknown): “, 2012), REMINDMAgPIE (Popp et al., 2011) and GCAM4 (Wise et al.”
Human well‐being and climate change mitigation (2017, background): “There is increasing attention paid in the modeling literature to the trade-offs between land-based mitigation (bioenergy), food production, and water scarcity—with, as previously mentioned, tight margins for achieving these multiple objectives.(133,134) A push towards model development can also be o”
The road to achieving the long-term Paris targets: energy transition and the role of direct air capture (2017, background): “The role of BECCS in the future energy system (Kriegler et al. 2013a; Fuss et al. 2014; van Vuuren et al. 2013; Popp et al. 2011; Klein et al. 2014) and that of afforestation (Canadell and Raupach 2008; IPCC 2007; Obersteiner et al.”