Abrupt Climate Change and geo-engineering the planet with carbon-negative bioenergy

Quicknote bioenergy science
A few days ago, we wrote a tentative piece on how bioenergy can be taken radically carbon-negative, and could thus potentially provide a strategy to mitigate climate change effectively if it were to prove more disastrous than expected.
In the meantime, researchers in the US published an interesting paper which shows that overconfidence leads to bias in climate change estimations; that indeed, global warming could be more 'dangerous' than we assume. They provide evidence that the current practice neglects a sizeable fraction of 'low probability' events that would have a huge impact on the world's environment, its economies and societies (basically, catastrophies, such as the collapse of the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic). This neglect results in biased outcomes and scenarios. According to their study, past scenarios of carbon dioxide emissions can miss as much as 40 percent of probabilistic projection, missing a large number of low-probability, high impact events. The scientists suggest that future scenarios should therefor include them.

Yesterday, our attention was drawn to previous research which precisely combines these two insights - the underestimation of the climate change threat, and an effective remedy to fend off the potential catastrophe. In their paper entitled 'Bio-Energy with Carbon Storage (BECS): a Sequential Decision Approach to the threat of Abrupt Climate Change', Peter Read and Jonathan Lermit show that

Abrupt Climate Change (ACC - NAS, 2001) is an issue that ‘haunts the climate change problem’ (IPCC, 2001) but has been neglected by policy makers up to now, maybe for want of practicable measures for effective response, save for risky geo-engineering.

Safe geo-engineering with bioenergy
In our previous piece, we mentioned some of these out-of-this-world geo-engineering plans that circulate within the scientific community (from seeding the oceans with iron, to doping the skies with sulphur). But Read and Lermit have identified "bio-energy with carbon storage" (BECS) as a safe, feasible, clean and efficient way of mitigating abrupt and catastrophic climate change.

Negative emissions energy systems are key to responding to ACC because – taking account of rising levels on non-CO2 greenhouse gases, for which no means exists for accelerating natural removal processes – the need may be to get to CO2 levels below pre-industrial. This cannot be done by natural absorption, even with zero emissions
energy [such as wind, solar, nuclear].

A portfolio of Bio-Energy with Carbon Storage (BECS) technologies, yielding negative emissions energy, may be seen as benign, low risk, geo-engineering that is the key to being prepared for ACC. The nature of sequential decisions, taken in response to the evolution of currently unknown events, is discussed. The impact of such decisions on land use change is related to a specific bio-energy conversion technology. The effects of a precautionary strategy, possibly leading to eventual land use change on a large scale, is modeled.

The advantage of BECS is that it allows societies to function in a relatively normal manner, because this geo-engineering option does not affect energy supplies. Even more, it is the only strategy that produces energy while taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (none of the other geo-engineering strategies yield energy during their implementation).

Read and Lermit show how effective BECS could be:

Under strong assumptions appropriate to imminent ACC, pre-industrial CO-levels can be restored by mid-century using BECS. Addressed to ACC rather than Kyoto’s implicit focus on gradual climate change, a robust strategy related to Art 3.3 of the Convention may provide the basis for rapprochement between Kyoto Parties and other Annex 1 Parties.

In short, in case of abrupt climate change, the best thing we can do is to radically implement bioenergy production on a vast and global scale, applying carbon capture and storage technologies. This carbon-negative energy system can bring us back to pre-industrial CO2 levels in a matter of decades.

Thanks for the reference, Frank!

More information:
P. Read and J. R. Lermit, "Bio-energy with carbon storage(BECS): a sequential decision approach to the threat of abrupt climate change", Energy, November 2005, vol. 30, no14, pp. 2654-2671 [*pdf - link to full article located at ACCStrategy)

Abstract at ScienceDirect.

Eurekalert: American Geophysical Union, 2006 Fall Meeting, Overconfidence leads to bias in climate change estimations - Dec. 15, 2006
bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: abrupt climate change :: CO2 :: geo-engineering :: biomass :: carbon negative :: carbon storage ::