Impact of Biogenic Carbon Neutrality Assumption for Achieving a Net-Zero Emission Target: Insights from a Techno-Economic Analysis

This studyshows that the assumption of carbon neutralitycould lead to biased decision-making when analyzing global and nationalnet-zero emission roadmaps. Global pathways limiting warming to 2 & DEG;C or belowrequiredeep carbon dioxide removal through a large-scale transformation ofthe land surface, an increase in forest cover, and the deploymentof negative emission technologies (NETs). Government initiatives endorsebioenergy as an alternative, carbon-neutral energy source for fossilfuels. However, this carbon neutral assumption is increasingly beingquestioned, with several studies indicating that it may result inaccounting errors and biased decision-making. To address this growingissue, we use a carbon budget model combined with an energy systemmodel. We show that including forest sequestration in the energy systemmodel alleviates the decarbonization effort. We discuss how a forestmanagement strategy with a high sequestration capacity reduces theneed for expensive negative emission technologies. This study indicatesthe necessity of establishing the most promising forest managementstrategy before investing in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.Finally, we describe how a carbon neutrality assumption may lead tobiased decision-making because it allows the model to use more biomasswithout being constrained by biogenic CO2 emissions. Therisk of biased decision-making is higher for regions that have lowerforest coverage, since available forest sequestration cannot sinkbiogenic emissions in the short term, and importing bioenergy couldworsen the situation.