New UCL research project to create integrated bioenergy supply chain model for the UK

Bioenergy is a complex and sometimes controversial subject. This upcoming project integrates models of different aspects of the UK bioenergy supply chains across multiple scales. The resulting tool will provide guidance to decision makers about the complex social and environmental impacts of differing bioenergy strategies to aid policy development.

Most energy system studies of the UK indicate a strong role for bioenergy in the coming decades, especially if the UK is to meet its emission targets. There is a need for multi-scale systems analyses to support the understanding of these inter-related issues and to support decision-making around land use, interactions with food production, global trade and acceleration of bioenergy technologies, while ensuring that sustainability is quantified and that minimum standards can be guaranteed.

This project will extend the spatially-explicit bioenergy modelling tool developed for the ETI (BVCM) by Imperial College and partners and combine it with other models and data, including the TIAM-UCL global integrated assessment model, the UK TIMES model, which analyses global and UK energy systems, a hybrid ecosystem-LCA framework developed for international bioenergy impacts by UKERC, resource models for feedstock supply from NERC and BBSRC, data on GHGs from ELUM and a global shipping model. Combining these resources will lead to cutting edge tools which can identify robust and promising options including land use, resources and technologies.

The aim of the project is to determine which value chains best support a technologically efficient, low cost and low carbon UK energy system. The models will internalise the use of land for food (i.e. key staples) and other non-food uses thereby enabling a rigorous, technologically- and spatially-explicit, whole systems analysis, while setting the UK within a global trading context, with inward and outward flows of food and bio-resources. This considerably extends our previous analysis. Avoiding artificial constraints which limit the land available for bioenergy and bio-based materials will lead to a better understanding of how biomass production can be intercalated into existing UK energy and agricultural infrastructures.

For key value chains shortlisted by the overall study, systems dynamics simulations will be used to develop and compare alternative implementation strategies and assess how robust they are to policy and resource shocks. The novel approach to coupling the value chains model to wider UK energy models as well as a combination of global analyses including food production and trade trends and energy systems and shipping models will ensure coherence in the overall systems and scenarios developed and to ensure clarity in the role of bioenergy in the UK energy system. Sample value chains developed will also be assessed in more detail for their wider ecosystem services, benefits and impacts within the UK, particularly in terms of the change in expected key ecosystem services overall arising from changes in land use. The implications of technological improvements in critical technologies such as 2nd generation biofuels, bio-synthetic natural gas and the provision of renewable heat will also be considered.

Global perspectives

On a larger scale, the economics of bioenergy from UK and global perspectives will be examined for holistic and internally-consistent scenarios for the first time using global and UK energy systems models and a global shipping model. The internalisation of exogenous boundary conditions (e.g. UK bioenergy import supply curves) and the improvements to the UK TIMES model, from being extended and coupled to the value chains model, will enable the most accurate assessment to date of how bioenergy might fit into the UK energy system and might interact with other energy vectors. The linking of value chain and energy system models will help to examine the opportunities and indirect impacts of increased biomass use for energy and material and critically evaluate mitigation strategies for GHG emissions and resource depletion, and will feed into a wider policy analysis activity that will examine the dynamics of changing system infrastructure at intermediate time periods between now and 2050.

This article was originally published at the webpage of the University of Southampton. To access it directly please click here.