Immediate deployment opportunities for negative emissions with BECCS: a Swedish case study

TL;DR

This paper assesses Sweden’s immediate potential for BECCS deployment, showing it could offset a significant portion of national emissions at current costs, highlighting a viable short-term negative emissions strategy.

Contribution

It identifies and quantifies Sweden's immediate BECCS deployment potential using existing bio-energy facilities, emphasizing its feasibility and cost benefits.

Findings

Potential for 20 Mt annual negative emissions in Sweden

Including BECCS in current incentives could save over 600 million euros annually

Sweden is well-positioned for immediate BECCS deployment

Abstract

To meet the 2{\deg}C target and, in particular the 1.5{\deg}C target defined in the Paris Agreement, rapid scaling-up of BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage) and other negative emissions technologies (NETs) is essential. Recent research on BECCS has mainly focused on biophysical and sustainability limitations to multi-Gigatonne deployment in the latter half of this century. However, this paper focuses on the critical short-term opportunities for immediate deployment, considering solely existing bio-energy facilities in Sweden as a case study. We show that the immediate potential for BECCS in this country amounts to 20 Mt annually. This corresponds to 39% of total GHG emissions in 2014 in Sweden. The current costs for implementing BECCS at this level is compared to the present carbon taxes and other incentives. We show that including BECCS in the carbon tax incentive mechanism at current incentive levels would yield 16.7 Mt of negative emissions annually with an estimated societal cost saving of more than 600 M e annually, when compared to current incentive marginal abatement costs. We conclude that Sweden is ideally positioned for immediate BECCS deployment.