Coal news and updates

Biomass cofiring loopholes put coal on open-ended life support in Asia

• Over the past 10 years, some of Asia’s coal-dependent, high-emitting nations have turned to biomass cofiring (burning coal and biomass together to make electricity) to reduce CO2 emissions on paper and reach energy targets. But biomass still generates high levels of CO2 at the smokestack and adds to dangerous global warming.
• In South Korea, renewable energy credits given for biomass cofiring flooded the market and made other renewables like wind and solar less profitable. Although subsides for imported biomass for cofiring have decreased in recent years, increased domestic biomass production is likely to continue fueling cofiring projects.
• In Japan, renewable energy subsidies initially prompted the construction of new cofired power plants. Currently, biomass cofiring is used to make coal plants seem less polluting in the near term as utilities prepare to cofire and eventually convert the nation’s coal fleet to ammonia, another “carbon-neutral” fuel.
• In Indonesia, the government and state utility, encouraged by Japanese industry actors, plan to implement cofiring at 52 coal plants across the country by 2025. The initiative will require “nothing less than the creation of a large-scale biomass [production] industry,” according to experts.

Amid calls for developed nations to phase out coal use by 2030, and for developing countries to do likewise by 2040, cofiring energy production — mixing coal with woody biomass — has emerged as a go-to, near-term climate policy fix in some of Asia’s chronically coal-dependent countries, where forest biomass burning is booming. But that solution has its problems, say analysts.

Both coal and woody biomass produce high levels of carbon emissions. But international carbon accounting rules based on controversial out-of-date science allow all smokestack discharges from wood to be counted as carbon neutral — a policy loophole, say critics, that guarantees cofiring’s reduced emissions on paper, if not in reality. Others argue cofiring is the only way some nations can realize their coal cuts.

In fact, scientists have determined that woody biomass is less carbon-efficient than coal, as it generates more CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour of electricity produced than coal.

The result of the big shift to cofiring isn’t a cut in emissions, but rather an ongoing period of “carbon debt” that will contribute to increased planetary “warming for decades to centuries” before trees can eventually regrow, according to a February 2021 open letter from more than 500 scientists to the leaders of biomass-burning nations.

Those scientists urgently warn that waiting for all those burned trees to be replaced by newly planted saplings, and for those young trees to then grow to maturity in order to sequester as much carbon as was originally burned, is time that the world just doesn’t have.