Producing energy from ligneous biomass often increases greenhouse gas emissions in the short term, even though the EU currently counts it as a carbon-neutral technology, according to an unreleased EU report obtained by the independent European news site EurActiv.
Biomass-derived energy will account for over 50% of EU Member States’ emissions reductions planned for 2020, but the leaked literature review conducted by the EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) concludes that “the use of roundwood (trees) from forests for bioenergy purposes would cause an actual increase in greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels in the short term.”
The review concludes that in the short term, burning a tree in the form of wood pellets or chips releases all the carbon that the tree has absorbed in its lifetime and reduces the capacity of forests to absorb atmospheric carbon until it has been replenished by the maturation of replacement trees. Thus while in the long term, using and replacing trees for energy can be carbon-neutral, this cannot be true in the few years between now and 2020. This conclusion was also reached in a 2011 paper published by the European Environment Agency.
EurActiv obtained the draft JRC paper after submitting a Freedom of Information request which was delayed for four months and finally reattributed to the European Commission’s Energy Directorate. EurActiv said it understood that while some textual issues relating to the JRC’s definition of the ‘carbon debt’ concept remained unresolved, the draft’s release had only been delayed by copyright issues.
The EurActiv leak came only days after the EC released draft legislation, reported by Automotiveworld.com, reducing its renewable bioenergy mandate to 5% from 10%, to exclude any increase in the use of indirect land use effects from food crop biofuels feedstocks.
