Last week, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) issued a stark warning to the new Government – only a third of the emissions reductions needed to meet our 2030 targets are currently covered by policy.[1] A key problem to date has been a “slowing of pace and reversed or delayed key policies” by the previous administration. If the Prime Minister and Energy Secretary genuinely want to make a success of their mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower, clear and consistent policy is absolutely critical.

The latest CCC report makes clear that to meet our emissions reductions targets and get to Net Zero, engineered removals, like Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) and Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) are needed. However, to ensure those projects are deployed on time and at the scale required, urgent policy progress is needed on several fronts, including the carbon capture Cluster Sequencing Programme and Track-1 expansion and Track-2 clusters.

A recent report from the National Engineering Policy Centre also recognised the “important strategic position” of BECCS but urged the government to take “stop-go” decisions on future support for biomass-fired units.[2] While we agree that biomass and BECCS must be done sustainably, the UK already has some of the most comprehensive bioenergy sustainability governance arrangements in the world, and we expect these to be enhanced even further through the development of the Cross Sectoral Sustainability Framework, as committed to in the 2023 Biomass Strategy.[3] That work is underway, and we will continue to support government to deliver it, but we can’t put climate change on hold. We need to act today, and that means deploying carbon removal technologies in a sensible, but urgent, time frame. Ensuring our removals technologies, like BECCS, are done correctly and sustainably, while also making progress to deploy them aren’t and cannot be mutually exclusive.

This also means maintaining vital biomass generation, while the transition to BECCS takes place. To do this, government must provide policy certainty for both large-scale generators via transitional support arrangements, consulted on earlier this year, and small and medium generators, who collectively account for more than 1100MW of capacity in the UK, but who aren’t currently within the scope of transitional support arrangements. Generators need to make investment decisions on fuel contracts and plant maintenance so ensuring longer-term reliability, consistent with BECCS, requires longer-term certainty to enable generators to make the investment decisions needed.

Creating such certainty will also provide off-taker confidence to landowners and the agricultural sector to cultivate sustainable feedstocks to increase our domestic supply of biomass, including innovative crops like miscanthus and willow, grown in accordance with appropriate land use guidance. Stable policy can deliver wider benefits to the UK economy and environment, even beyond the carbon removals themselves. That’s why we need to leave behind any suggestions of a “stop-go” approach and focus on long-term, clear and consistent policy that provides generators and investors with the certainty needed to get carbon removals technologies deployed as quickly as possible. This is the only way that Britain becomes a clean energy superpower, the only way we reach our decarbonisation targets, and the only way we tackle climate change and meet Net Zero.

Author: Samantha Smith, Head of Biomass, REA

[1] CCC (July, 2024), “Progress in reducing emissions: 2024 report to Parliament”, https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/progress-in-reducing-emissions-2024-report-to-parliament/

[2] NEPC (July 2024), “Rapid decarbonisation of the GB electricity system”, https://nepc.raeng.org.uk/media/uoqclnri/electricity-decarbonisation-report.pdf

[3] DESNZ (August 2023), “Biomass Strategy 2023”, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/biomass-strategy