An analysis of Stockholm Exergi’s proposed flagship BECCS installation

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EU flagship BECCS project will burn forests and public capital but won’t help the climate

As part of its climate action, the EU is preparing to scale up carbon dioxide removal technologies, to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) - burning biomass, burying the resulting carbon dioxide underground and claiming this achieves “negative emissions” - is a technology that features prominently in EU and Swedish climate strategies. Fern’s new report outlines why their hoped for reductions exceed potential achievements, and the risks that are insufficiently understood.

The report investigates the largest BECCS project in the EU, developed by the company Stockholm Exergi in Sweden. It finds that:

The project will probably not achieve negative emissions. While it will certainly burn millions of tonnes of wood and huge amounts of public and private capital, it is unlikely to help the climate crisis. BECCS installations only remove carbon from forests, not the atmosphere. Even though living European forests actually remove carbon from the air, not enough is being done to support them.
At the time of writing, Stockholm Exergi had still not found a suitable underground storage for the carbon it wants to capture.
The project relies on efficiency and capture rates that have never been met by a CCS installation in the power sector.

There are considerably cheaper and more effective alternatives to BECCS: an 0.8% reduction of Sweden’s annual wood harvest would sequester as much carbon dioxide as Stockholm Exergi promises, directly from the atmosphere. This would be achieved at a fraction of the cost, and with several co-benefits.