Today, bioenergy is the primary renewable energy source that significantly contributes to power utilized in energy generation, buildings and industry’s heat, and transportation.
In fact, the IEA or International Energy Agency has indicated that today’s bioenergy is an essential contributor to the future’s low carbon emissions. Simply put, these can be the long-awaited solution for climate change commitment.
Bioenergy’s key features:
- Can produce harmful emissions when connected to Carbon Storage and Capture
- Can support intermittent renewables expansion; thus, it is storable
- Readily incorporated with current infrastructures
- Applicable in energy sectors such as transport, direct heat, and electricity
- Available now
Bioenergy can contribute to greenhouse gas reduction when it’s:
- Used to replace GHG-intensive fuels
- Converted into energy supplies efficiently
- Biomass is sustainably grown or based on residues or wastes
Overall, bioenergy encompasses a lot of potential feedstocks, energy applications, and conversion processes.
It also strongly interacts with waste management and forestry sectors, agriculture, and its likelihood is associated with a broader bio-economy growth. However, bioenergy will only be widely applicable if used and supplied sustainably.
There are three types of organic wastes and residues: industrial, municipal, as well as forestry and agricultural residues. Examples of industrial wastes and residues are wood processing and agro-food processing.
For municipal wastes, we also have material waste such as building material, wastewaters, and household wastes. Lastly, examples of forestry and agricultural residues are livestock residues and crop and wood harvesting residues.
Plenty of bioenergy routes may be utilized to transform many raw feedstocks into final energy products. Examples of products are as follows:
- Biogas
- RDF or refuse-derived fuel
- Syngas or bio-synthetic gas
- Pyrolysis oil
- Pellets
- Woodchips
- Advanced biofuels
- Cellulosic ethanol
- Renewable diesel
- Bioethanol
- Biodiesel
Specifically, production processes like gasification, pelletization, chipping, fermentation, transesterification, anaerobic digestion, and many more are used to convert the products mentioned above into biomass-based products and materials, biofuels for transport and combustion for heat and electricity.
Moreover, the technologies used for biomass power and heat production have already been competitive and well developed in several applications.
These are considered to be biofuel routes for transport. In addition, a wide technological conversion range is still under development, providing improved efficiency prospects, enhanced performance, and lower costs.