What is BECCS? Exploring carbon capture, renewable energy and forestry resilience
By: Margi Pandya
BioEnergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is a technology pathway that can simultaneously remove carbon from the atmosphere, generate renewable energy and support forestry sector resilience.
Canada is uniquely positioned to make BECCS work, and yet, many Canadians have never heard of it.
What is BECCS?
BECCS is a technology pathway that turns fuel like biomass, wood residuals (e.g., sawdust from sawmills), logging residues from forestry operations and black liquor from pulp mills into energy, while permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Here’s how it works:
Trees absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) as they grow
Throughout their lives, trees pull CO2 from the air and store it in the form of wood, while simultaneously capturing and storing solar energy, all at no cost.
That stored carbon becomes energy
When biomass is burned to generate electricity or heat (often at pulp mills or power plants), it releases the CO2 that trees captured from the air over the course of their growth. This combustion process releases solar energy in the form of heat; this is the “bioenergy.”
CO2 is captured and stored underground – permanently
Instead of letting CO2 go back into the atmosphere, BECCS facilities capture and permanently store the gas deep underground in geological formations.
The result
BECCS is the only energy technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere while simultaneously generating energy.
What makes BECCS different?
BECCS is the only energy technology pathway that removes carbon from the atmosphere while generating power.
Solar panels and wind turbines produce clean energy without emissions, but they don’t remove the CO2 that’s driving global temperature increases. BECCS does both: it generates the energy we need while pulling greenhouse gases out of the air. When done right, every year a BECCS plant operates, there’s less CO2 in the atmosphere than when it started.
Where does the wood come from?
BECCS doesn’t require cutting down forests.
The biomass comes from materials that already exist as waste or wildfire risk, such as sawdust and wood chips from sawmills, small trees removed when thinning overcrowded forests, branches left over from logging operations and debris piling up on the forest floor. This is material that would otherwise rot (releasing CO2 anyway), get burned as waste or become fuel for catastrophic wildfires.
How is BECCS related to wildfire prevention?
BECCS doesn’t fight wildfires directly; rather, it creates an economic incentive for active forest management.
By providing a market for biomass residuals, small trees and forest debris, BECCS makes fuel reduction treatments economically viable. Material that would otherwise accumulate in forests as wildfire fuel, like dead trees, undergrowth and thinnings, instead becomes feedstock for energy generation and carbon removal.
In Canada, wildfires are the largest source of CO2 emissions. 2023 was the worst wildfire season on record in the country, burning over 18 million hectares – an area larger than Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island combined.
Why is BECCS an option in Canada?
Canada has 166 million hectares of forest land that is independently certified as sustainably managed. As a result, it has abundant, sustainably managed forest biomass from sawmill residuals and forest management operations.
When it comes to Canada’s forests, 75 per cent are boreal, which stretch across the northern region of the country. Boreal forests behave differently from tropical forests: unlike tropical forests, where carbon is primarily stored in living trees, boreal forests store significant carbon in soil and peat.
Boreal forests also experience natural fire cycles, and when fires occur, the stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere. This fire-prone nature makes active forest management, including removing excess fuel loads, critical for preventing catastrophic wildfires and carbon releases.
Carbon capture and storage is not new to Canada and Western Canada already has a competitive advantage.
While many regions lack suitable geological formations to permanently store captured carbon underground, Western Canada, specifically Alberta, has them in abundance.
In addition, decades of oil and gas development have created extensive geological knowledge, and existing CO2 pipeline infrastructure and regulatory frameworks are already in place to manage underground storage safely.
Margi Pandya is a policy analyst with the Canada West Foundation.