Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been proposed as a potential climate mitigation strategy raising concerns over trade‐offs with existing ecosystem services. We evaluate the feasibility of BECCS in the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB), a landscape with diverse land use, ownership, and bioenergy potential. We develop land‐use change scenarios and a switchgrass (
Hydropower Replacement and the Nexus of Food-Energy-Water Systems: Impacts on Climate Performance
The nexus of food, energy, and water systems offers a meaningful lens to evaluate hydroelectric dam removal decisions. Maintaining adequate power supplies and flourishing fish populations hangs on the balance of managing the tradeoffs of water resource management. Aside from energy adequacy, substituting hydropower with other renewable energy sources impacts the overall energy dispatch behavior of the grid, including emissions of existing fossil fuels. This study extends earlier work in the literature to evaluate the adequacy impact to the power supply by removing four Lower Snake River dams in the Columbia River Basin in favor of supporting migratory salmon populations. The authors explore the climate performance, i.e., fossil fuel dispatch changes, of simulated renewable substitution portfolios to supplement performance metrics alongside adequacy and initial investment metrics. The study finds that including the climate metric greatly influences the favorability of some alternative portfolios that would otherwise be overlooked, with some portfolios improving climate mitigation efforts by reducing emissions over the baseline scenario. The contribution is in advancing a straightforward and supplementary climate performance method that can accompany any energy portfolio analysis.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1804560
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10334066
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 344 to 348
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Panicum virgatum L.) crop functional type to use in a land‐surface model to simulate second‐generation bioenergy production. By the end of this century, average annual switchgrass production over the UMRB ranges from 60 to 210 Tg dry mass/year and is dependent on the Representative Concentration Pathway for greenhouse gas emissions and on land‐use change assumptions. Under our simple phase‐in assumptions this results in a cumulative total production of 2,000–6,000 Tg C over the study period with the upper estimates only possible in the absence of climate change. Switchgrass yields decreased as average CO2concentrations and temperatures increased, suggesting the effect of elevated atmospheric CO2was small because of its C4 photosynthetic pathway. By the end of the 21st century, the potential energy stored annually in harvested switchgrass averaged between 1 and 4 EJ/year assuming perfect conversion efficiency, or an annual electrical generation capacity of 7,000–28,000 MW assuming current bioenergy efficiency rates. Trade‐offs between bioenergy and ecosystem services were identified, including cumulative direct losses of 1,000–2,600 Tg C stored in natural ecosystems from land‐use change by 2090. Total cumulative losses of ecosystem carbon stocks were higher than the potential ~300 Tg C in fossil fuel emissions from the single largest power plant in the region over the same time period, and equivalent to potential carbon removal from the atmosphere from using biofuels grown in the same region. Numerous trade‐offs from BECCS expansion in the UMRB must be balanced against the potential benefits of a carbon‐negative energy system. -
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEM50564.2021.9672812
