The Wood Recyclers’ Association has welcomed government proposals to support the deployment of greenhouse gas removals (GGR) technologies and power bioenergy carbon capture and storage (power BECCS) over the next decade.
But, the association has warned that the eligibility criteria for accessing support must be inclusive and not exclude many waste-wood powered biomass plants and the valuable contribution they could make.
The proposals came in two consultations launched over the summer by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The first, which closed on September 27, sought views on the design of a business model to support the deployment at scale of engineered GGR technologies. These are technologies which would remove carbon and store it, thereby creating negative emissions.
The second consultation, which closed on October 7, sought views on proposals for a business model to incentivise the deployment of one of these technologies – power BECCS.
Power BECCS are expected to play an important role in helping the UK to achieve net zero through delivering negative emissions and could be retrofitted to existing waste wood-fuelled biomass plants.
Julia Turner, Executive Director of the WRA, said: “We welcome government plans to develop a Greenhouse Gas Removal business model to enable a diverse portfolio of technologies to deploy at scale over the next decade. We also welcome plans to support First of A Kind Power BECCS projects.
“However, the Cluster Sequencing guidance has created a minimum 100 MW threshold for BECCs and stipulated that facilities should not be in receipt of electricity subsidy as of 2027. Both of these rules would preclude the majority of waste wood biomass facilities. We therefore believe that this should be reconsidered to lower the threshold and also to allow facilities to move from ROCs support to other subsidy regimes such as GGR.”
She added: “BEIS need to ensure that both retro-fit and new-build projects need to be included and that support should be offered for all scales of project (small, medium and large)”.
The WRA also highlighted in its consultation responses that the power BECCS business model should be designed flexibly enough to enable both the construction of new BECCS operations and the retro-fitting of CCS to existing biomass plants that utilise waste wood.
The Association added that the existing UK ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) would provide an appropriate long-term market for negative emissions.