Edited by: Phil Renforth, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
Reviewed by: Matthias Honegger, Perspectives Climate Research gGmbH, Germany; Naomi E. Vaughan, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
This article was submitted to Negative Emission Technologies, a section of the journal Frontiers in Climate
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Paris-compatible climate scenarios often consider bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as an important technology for carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Although the main barrier to BECCS deployment is often associated with lack of economic policy incentives, unfavorable regulations can also impede investments. Over the past decade, the regulatory conditions at the UN and on the EU level have developed to be more permissive toward BECCS. For instance, CDR accounting guidelines have been developed by the UN, and the EU CCS Directive regulates responsibilities regarding storage of CO2. However, several existing regulations still cause deployment hurdles. Taking a European viewpoint, this perspectives article takes stock of recent regulatory developments and provides a discussion on legal acts that need to be reformed in order to facilitate BECCS deployment. Although the European trend is characterized by developing a regulatory regime that is more supportive of BECCS, we identify three areas for further improvement: (1) allowing EU Member States to use negative emissions from BECCS to comply with their obligations under the legislative pillars that underpin the EU's climate objectives: (2) amending the CCS Directive to exempt physical leakage of biogenic CO2, attributable to sustainably sourced biomass, from the requirement to surrender emission allowances in the EU ETS or, if BECCS has been economically rewarded, the penalty for leakage should correspond to the level of the reward; and (3) pushing to erase the last few barriers due to multilateral regimes, such as clarifying whether BECCS is covered by the geoengineering moratorium maintained by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. These proposed reforms would further improve the regulatory preconditions for BECCS deployment in the EU.
The pathways for restraining global warming to 1.5°C rely on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to offset emissions. In several climate change scenarios, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a key CDR mitigation technology (IPCC,
By emphasizing the need to address barriers to BECCS if it is to contribute to EU climate action, this perspective article will focus on regulatory preconditions for BECCS deployment. While noting the severe lack of economic policy incentives to commercialize BECCS, this article will instead primarily focus on regulations that can create an administrative burden and thus extra transaction costs or other types of barriers that can hinder the deployment of the entire BECCS chain, from capture, to transportation, to storage of biogenic CO2. Applying a European viewpoint, this article provides a discussion on how several multilateral and EU regulatory barriers have recently been lowered or erased and points out the most crucial remaining barriers to BECCS deployment. The article ends with policy recommendations to address and eliminate the remaining regulatory barriers to BECCS deployment.
First and foremost, with current accounting rules negative emissions from BECCS cannot be used to achieve the EU's climate objectives. While it is possible for EU Member States to report negative emissions from BECCS, such negative emissions cannot be used to comply with obligations under any of the three legislative pillars designed to deliver the EU's economy-wide objectives for 2030 and 2050, i.e., the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), the Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR), and the Land-Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation. In other words, negative emissions from BECCS can be recognized for information purposes but not to achieve Member States' obligations, and thus the current EU regulations do not encourage Member States to incentivize BECCS within their jurisdictions.
It should be noted that the European Commission recently proposed a target to remove 5 MtCO2 in 2030 using technological CDR (EU,
Regarding the EU ETS, it establishes a cap-and-trade system in the EU with the aim to cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions (EU,
The ESR supplements the EU ETS by setting a target for emissions reductions in the non-trading sectors and by allocating individual commitments to the EU Member States (EU,
The LULUCF Regulation does in fact already recognize some forms of CDR (forest sinks and harvested wood products). It requires the EU Member States to maintain their existing LULUCF sinks (the no-debit rule), and the European Commission is proposing to further increase the volume of aggregated, obligatory removal by 2030, to expand the regulation to managed land by 2026, and to extend the regulation to all non-CO2 emissions and CDR from agriculture from 2031 onwards, including emissions from soils and from other agricultural sources, e.g., enteric fermentation, manure management, liming, and use of fertilizers (EU,
The IPCC's accounting framework to account for negative emissions from BECCS—even if BECCS cannot be used to fulfill EU Member States' commitments or achieve joint objectives—has developed rapidly in the last couple of years. The international accounting guidelines developed by the IPCC, used as a basis for agreeing on accounting rules in the UNFCCC and the EU (EU,
Based on the proposed certification scheme, the European Commission has also signaled an intent to support the voluntary, or even establish a new market, for CDR in the land sector, starting with what it refers to as “nature-based” removal (EU,
The certification scheme, and new and more refined accounting of CDR, would make various CDR methods comparable, allowing one to weigh the value of engineered CDR against nature-based CDR, i.e., it would make different types of CDR fungible. As such, the proposed CDR market could be expanded beyond nature-based approaches to also include engineered CDR. Integrating BECCS into this market could be facilitated by regulating it under the same legislative pillar, i.e., LULUCF. This has the potential to strengthen cost-efficiency by diversifying supply and increasing liquidity and to improve preconditions for achieving the EU's ambition to become a net greenhouse gas sink after 2050. On the other hand, the aspiration of the EU to become net negative beyond 2050 necessitates what Geden et al. (
It should be stressed, however, that the European Commission has not provided any clear guidance on how it envisages the scope for expanding a new nature-based CDR market to include BECCS and other engineered CDR, nor how such an expanded market could be linked to a regulatory home for BECCS among the legislative pillars that underpin the climate objectives of the EU. This regulatory unclarity, heavily linked to the issue of creating economic incentives for BECCS, requires the full attention of the European Commission in order to scale up BECCS deployment.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD) is a global treaty aimed at preserving biological diversity and to assure the sustainable use of components of biological diversity. In 2010, the parties to the CBD decided on a moratorium on geoengineering, which stated that because there is no transparent global control mechanism for geoengineering, no climate-related geoengineering activities that might affect biodiversity should take place before sufficient scientific knowledge exists to justify such activities, a decision that was reaffirmed by the UNCBD in 2016 (CBD,
A future global or European market for negative emissions could lead to increased demand for biomass, which may have negative consequences for biodiversity. However, the Renewable Energy Directive (EU,
In June 2020, the EU adopted an investment taxonomy, a framework aiming to make it easier for investors to identify environmentally sustainable investments through a standardized classification system (EU,
Geological sub-seabed storage is regulated in several international treaties. The London Protocol, originating in the International Maritime Organization's London Convention, aims at limiting marine pollution (IMO,
However, access to storage sites often requires cross-border transport, and the London Protocol prohibits export of CO2 intended for sub-seabed storage. Although an amendment to the London Protocol was agreed on in 2009, which allows for the export of CO2 (IMO,
The CCS directive enables and provides rules for geological storage (EU,
Another related issue with the CCS Directive is that domestic sub-seabed storage in areas close to territories outside the EU might be hindered if a geological storage site extends to territories outside the EU. One example is a possible geological storage site in the southern Baltic Sea that includes Russian territory (SOU,
As noted by Fridahl and Lehtveer (
Finally, it is worth recognizing that the existing EU regulation requires the operator of capture facilities to also be responsible for leakage during transport. Operators of capture facilities are expected to subcontract transport of CO2, meaning that operators of capture facilities are responsible for leakage during transportation despite their lack of control over the transport. This requires, as noted by Jordal et al. (
The lack of policy leverage to compensate for the high costs of CO2 capture, transport, and storage infrastructure are crucial for BECCS commercialization. However, regulatory preconditions also have an important role in filling the commercialization gap. Over the past decade, regulatory conditions for BECCS have become more permissive. For instance, accounting guidelines have been developed by the IPCC, and several multilateral agreements have been amended to allow CO2 export and sub-seabed storage. Several other regulatory reforms are in process and are pending adoption by the European Parliament and the Council, including clarification of approved means of transportation of CO2 and of responsibilities for physical leakage of CO2 during transport. However, the current regulatory regime still contains gaps and raises barriers that must be addressed to facilitate BECCS deployment. The significance of regulation is only going to increase as economic policy instruments, designed to incentivize negative emissions, are likely to develop in the coming years, both on the EU level and in Member States. The most urgent regulatory reforms are to:
Allow EU Member States to use negative emissions from BECCS to comply with their obligations under one or several of the legislative pillars that underpin the EU's climate objectives, i.e., the Effort Sharing Regulation, the EU Emissions Trading System, and the Land-Use, Land Use Change and Forestry Regulation.
Amend the CCS Directive to distinguish between physical leakage of fossil and biogenic CO2 from geological storage sites. The share of leakage that could be attributed to sustainably sourced biomass, in accordance with sustainability criteria in the Renewable Energy Directive, ought to be exempted from the requirement to surrender emission allowances in the EU ETS or, if BECCS has been economically rewarded, the penalty for leakage should correspond to the level of the reward to avoid creating perverse incentives and/or investment risks.
Erase the existing barriers provided by multilateral regimes, such as clarifying whether BECCS is covered by the geoengineering moratorium maintained by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Alongside the key issue of agreeing on economic policy incentives for BECCS, addressing the proposed regulatory barriers is crucial to further encourage BECCS deployment.
Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. The datasets analyzed for this study can be found in online legal repositories of the UN, regional multilateral organizations, and the EU. The names of the repositories and accession numbers can be found at:
The article was planned by MF. TN made the first draft of the article. Thereafter, in collaboration between MF and TN, the article was discussed and revised in all parts including new text and references. Both authors approved the submitted version.
This work was supported by the Swedish Energy Agency (Grant Nos. 51200-1, 51579-1, and 51569-1), Energiforsk, and the Swedish Research Council Formas (Grant Nos. 2019-01993 and 2019-01973).
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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