New opportunities for biomass energy development in the context of carbon neutrality

Biomass energy has unique advantages in "heat-electricity" and energy storage, and can bring "negative carbon" opportunities

Biomass is an eco-friendly, zero-carbon energy source that has obvious advantages over other commercially available energy sources today.

First, the environmental externality of biomass energy is low, which is conducive to the realization of circular economy. For example, biomass power generation provides an effective way for the treatment and utilization of agricultural and forestry waste, which helps to reduce the open burning of straw and the environmental pollution it brings. In this process, the ash generated after biomass combustion can also be used as an organic fertilizer, so as to realize the recycling of agricultural and forestry waste and "turn waste into treasure". In addition, the promotion of biomass fuel to replace coal in industrial production is also a way to reuse biomass resources and help achieve carbon reduction in the industrial sector.

Second, the use of biomass energy can solve the problem of electricity and heat at the same time, which is an advantage that other forms of renewable energy use such as wind power and photovoltaic power generation do not have. Due to the limitations of technology, land and the characteristics of wind and water renewable energy, China will focus on large-scale heat pump technology to solve the heating problem through electrification in the future, and it still faces many challenges. Therefore, another possibility is to retain some of the thermal power in the new power system of the future, and make it also heat (as discussed below). Then, in this scenario, biomass energy will also play a role in power supply and heating, and show its zero-carbon advantage.

Third, biomass can help solve energy storage problems at different time scales, and provide support for the construction of a new, safe and stable power system with renewable energy as the main body. In this regard, biomass can be used as an energy option to solve energy storage problems on different time scales, including hourly, cross-day, cross-week and even cross-season.

Fourth, biomass presents an opportunity to go carbon negative and contribute significantly to rural revitalization. Biomass resources effectively absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide in the growth process, although the process of being used as fuel or industrial raw materials will emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but from the perspective of the whole cycle can achieve "net zero" emissions of carbon dioxide. On this basis, if combined with CCS technology, the carbon dioxide emitted can be captured and stored, it can achieve valuable carbon dioxide "negative emissions", which will undoubtedly help the realization of carbon neutrality goals. In this context, it can be predicted that the further development of the biomass industry will drive rural economic growth, help eliminate rural energy poverty, and achieve rural revitalization.

Facing the bottleneck of large-scale commercialization, it is necessary to seize the opportunity of "carbon neutrality" to make a breakthrough

Biomass in China is not a new thing, has experienced a certain period of development. However, up to now, the development scale of China's biomass industry is still limited. Taking the power industry as an example, according to the information of the National Energy Administration, by the end of 2021, China's installed biomass power generation capacity reached 37.98 million kilowatts, accounting for only about 3.6% of the total installed renewable energy power generation capacity; In contrast, wind power and photovoltaic power installed capacity has reached 328 million kilowatts and 306 million kilowatts, respectively. Fundamentally, there are two reasons worth exploring:

First, due to the limitations of many factors, biomass has not formed large-scale commercialization. Different from coal, gasoline, natural gas, wind energy, solar energy and other energy sources that have been able to achieve centralized and large-scale utilization, the large-scale utilization of biomass resources faces constraints such as dispersed resource distribution, wide range and low accumulation density, which makes its collection, storage, processing and transportation very different and more difficult from other energy sources, so a complete industrial chain has not yet been formed. The scale of commercialization is not enough. From the property of biomass itself, compared with coal, oil, natural gas and other fossil energy, the energy density of biomass is relatively low, so the heat generated by the same volume or mass is also relatively low; From the perspective of availability and scale, the distribution of biomass resources is relatively dispersed, wide range and difficult to use directly, which leads to the high cost of collection, storage, processing and transportation, hindering the formation of a complete industrial chain and limiting the development of scale; From the perspective of technology, the utilization of advanced biomass technology in China is generally in an immature stage. Developed countries have obvious first-mover advantages in the field of biomass resource utilization and product manufacturing, and the monopoly of core technologies makes China rely on imports of many key technologies and key equipment for biomass conversion and utilization. From the policy point of view, for a long time, the absence of encouraging policies and incentives, coupled with the failure of some early demonstration projects, has also made biomass energy, like other renewable energy sources, has not been able to obtain the policy support and more market confidence. In summary, under the comprehensive effect of various factors such as its own attributes, storage efficiency, transportation costs, technical equipment, policy measures, and market confidence, the development of biomass energy faces the problems of high industrial costs and limited large-scale production, and has not yet formed large-scale commercial applications.