Climate Change is Coming? Only if we stand by and do nothing. Which is where BECCS comes into play.

Vast bioenergy plantations could stave off climate change-and radically reshape the planet

On a sunny day this past October, three dozen people file into a modest, mint-green classroom at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman to glimpse a vision of the future. Some are scientists, but most are people with some connection to the land: extension agents who work with farmers, and environmentalists representing organizations such as The Nature Conservancy.

 From article, (The idea is to cultivate fast-growing grasses and trees to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and then burn them at power plants to generate energy. But instead of being released back into the atmosphere in the exhaust, the crops' carbon would be captured and pumped underground. The technique is known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or—among climate wonks—simply as BECCS.

As BECCS is usually conceived, bioenergy crops would be grown on unused agricultural land. In the Upper Missouri River Basin, that could mean conscripting fields set aside as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to leave fields fallow for environmental benefits. Given the right incentives, farmers could pull these lands back into production—something that has already happened in the region as demand for corn and soy have grown. "Farmers are no different than anyone else. We are profit-driven," Flikkema says.

BECCS isn't a total technological reach, either; its two components—bioenergy and CCS—are already happening to some degree today. Power plants around the world are burning biomass for energy, either alone or together with fossil fuels. CCS has been slow to take off, but dozens of projects are underway, including numerous pilots in the Great Plains, many of which pump CO2from fossil fuel power plants into dwindling wells to drive out residual oil. One of the longest-running operations is in the North Sea, where the Norwegian oil company Statoil has been separating CO2 from natural gas and sequestering it underground for more than 2 decades.

To put the brakes on climate change, however, these tools would have to be deployed on an entirely unproven scale.

 Some BECCS advocates disagree, saying that if it were done right, it could be a boon for the environment. Today, much of the abandoned farmland where second-generation bioenergy crops could grow is degraded and dominated by invasive plants, says Phil Robertson, an ecologist at Michigan State University's W. K. Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners. "Generally, it doesn't have high conservation value," he says. But field studies in the Midwest suggest that planting native switchgrass, with a few other plant species thrown in for good measure, could actually help restore the grassland ecosystems that once covered the middle of the continent. With smart policies in place, Robertson envisions a world in which farmers could turn the profits from bioenergy harvests back into restoring more land. "I think it could underwrite conservation," he says.

Worldwide, there is no shortage of farmland that's been abandoned because of low productivity or fickle markets. A conservative estimate by Field and his colleagues suggests an area at least the size of India is available globally, and others suggest there is several times that—plenty to support a robust BECCS industry. 

If we are going to rely on technologies like BECCS in the future, we need to start ramping them up now, says Sabine Fuss, an economist at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin. "It's a little bit dangerous if it's conceived as something that you just switch on." So far, only one commercial plant is doing anything close to BECCS—a bioethanol refinery in Decatur, Illinois, that each year sequesters 1 million tons of CO2 released from fermenting corn.

The researchers repeatedly try to impress this upon the audience in Bozeman—that despite its many risks and drawbacks, they should take BECCS seriously. Some amount of BECCS, or some other carbon-eating technology, is probably coming. "Even though it's very fantastical at this point to think it could happen," Poulter says, "it's one of only a few remaining options we have to deal with this problem."

BECCS would bring sweeping changes to the region, but then again, so will climate change. Indeed, among all the options the team will consider in its study, there is one it won't include: allowing the Upper Missouri River Basin to stay the same.)

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