Millinger et al: Diversity of biomass usage pathways to achieve emissions targets in the European energy system | 2024

Key takeaways

• Biomass is a versatile renewable energy source and finds applications in many aspects across the energy system.
• Nevertheless,its resources are limited, and its use needs to be prioritised.
• The paper is diving into the energy system in Europe associated with the different sector and explores near-optimal solutions for achieving emissions targets.
• The main finding: provision of biogenic carbon has higher value than bioenergy provision.
• In addition, excluding biomass would lead to a 20% increase in the energy system costs when wanting to achieve net-negative emissions targets.
• The use of bioenergy covering around 1% of total electricity generation fordispatchable bioelectricity strengthen supply reliability.
• For the rest, determining in which sector biomass should be used is not crucial as long as it is combine with carbon capture to enable negative emissions and use the capture CO2 for the production of e-fuels.
• A shortageof renewable electricity or hydrogen supply primarily increases the value ofusing biomass for fuel production.

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