Europe's Biomass Ceiling: Why Hydrogen Has to Carry Two-Thirds of the Load
Replacing Europe's transport fuels and fossil chemical feedstocks with biomass would need roughly three times the sustainable supply the continent can expect by 2050. That shortage puts a premium on every tonne of sustainable carbon the Baltic can reach, from pulp mills and biogas plants to the unavoidable process emissions of cement and lime kilns.
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HydrogenLatvia
9/8/20265 min read
There is a comfortable assumption doing the rounds in the Baltic, and it goes something like this: we have forests, forests give us biomass, biomass gives us fuel, so the hard part of the transport transition is already solved. It is a nice story. The arithmetic does not support it.
The numbers that close the argument
A calculation published this week by David Strittmatter, CEO and co-founder of ICODOS, in the interesting LinkedIn post puts a hard edge on something the sector has been circling for years. Replacing today's EU transport energy and the main fossil chemical feedstocks with biomass would take somewhere between 1.6 and 1.9 billion dry tonnes every year. The sustainable supply available for all energy and material uses in Agora's 2050 scenario is around 533 million dry tonne equivalents.
That covers 28 to 33 per cent of the requirement. And that is the generous reading, because it assumes every last sustainable tonne is handed to fuels and chemical feedstocks, with nothing left for wood products, paper, panels or heat. In the real economy those uses are already spoken for.
These are the author's own conversions, at an assumed 18 GJ per dry tonne and 50 to 60 per cent conversion efficiency, comparing 2023 demand against projected 2050 supply. Worth verifying against the underlying Agora and JRC work before quoting in a business case. But the direction is not in doubt, and a factor of three does not disappear under a different set of assumptions.
Where the two-thirds has to come from
If biomass covers a third at absolute best, something has to cover the rest. There are only two candidates at scale: direct electrification, and molecules made from renewable electricity. Electrification takes the easy end of the demand — cars, vans, short-distance freight, low-temperature heat — and it should take as much as it can, because every terawatt-hour that goes straight into a battery is a terawatt-hour that never needs converting.
What is left after that is the hard end, and it is exactly the end where hydrogen-derived fuels are the only serious answer. This is why Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders should stop framing hydrogen as competing with bioenergy for the same job. They are doing different jobs, and there is more than enough work to go around.
Aviation and shipping do not get an easier deal
The instinctive fallback is to ring-fence biomass for the sectors that cannot electrify. Reserve it for aviation and shipping, the thinking goes, and the shortfall becomes manageable. It does not. Restricting the replacement to those two sectors still calls for 560 to 670 million dry tonnes a year — more than the entire 533 million tonne sustainable supply, before anyone builds a single wooden house or produces a tonne of paper.
For a region with Ventspils, Riga and Klaipėda on its coastline, that is not an abstract European problem. Baltic bunkering and regional aviation are being asked to decarbonise on a timetable set by FuelEU Maritime and ReFuelEU Aviation, and the bio-only pathway runs out of feedstock before it runs out of mandate. E-methanol and e-SAF are not the exotic option here. They are the volume option.
Biogenic carbon is the Baltic asset worth protecting
Here is where the picture turns from a constraint into an opportunity, and where we think the Baltic conversation should actually sit. The scarce thing is not wood. The scarce thing is carbon — carbon that is not pulled fresh out of the ground, whether it leaves a forest or a kiln.
Burn a tonne of biomass as fuel and the carbon is gone. Run the same biogenic carbon through a synthesis loop with electrolytic hydrogen and you get substantially more finished fuel or chemical out of the same tonne, because the hydrogen is doing the energy work and the carbon is only doing the carbon work. The region already has the point sources:
Pulp, paper and wood-processing sites with concentrated, consistent biogenic CO₂ streams.
Biogas upgrading plants, where the separated CO₂ is close to pure and currently vented. Latvian biomethane capacity has been drawing serious capital lately, including EBRD-backed financing, which quietly adds to this carbon pool.
Large biomass CHP, including the district-heating fleet that keeps Latvian cities warm through the winter.
None of those streams is worth much on its own. Paired with renewable hydrogen from the region's wind and grid position, each of them becomes the carbon half of a fuel that aviation and shipping are legally obliged to buy.
Unavoidable process CO₂ widens the carbon pool
Biogenic carbon is not the only sustainable carbon on the table, and in Latvia it may not even be the largest single stream. Cement carries a chemical emission that no fuel switch removes: calcining limestone releases CO₂ from the rock itself, roughly two-thirds of a clinker plant's emissions, and that share is unavoidable whatever the kiln burns. The same physics applies to lime kilns, including the recovery kilns in pulp production.
For years that was framed purely as a capture-and-store problem. Read it through the biomass ceiling and it looks different — a large, concentrated, permanently available carbon supply sitting next to a fuel market that is short of carbon. SCHWENK Latvija has already opened a carbon capture test base at its Brocēni cement plant, working with Capsol Technologies and within the CCS Baltic Consortium. That project is being built as a capture and storage pathway, and it is worth being precise about that. But the CO₂ it separates is chemically the same molecule an e-methanol synthesis loop needs.
Which puts a question in front of the region that has not really been asked out loud. If Latvia is going to invest in capturing process CO₂ anyway, and if sustainable carbon is the binding constraint on e-methanol and e-SAF volumes, then utilisation deserves to be evaluated alongside storage rather than after it. Capture is the expensive part and it is common to both routes. The difference is what happens at the outlet.
Storage puts the carbon away permanently and earns its value through the ETS.
Utilisation with renewable hydrogen turns the same tonne into a fuel that aviation and shipping are mandated to buy, at prices set by scarcity rather than by an avoided-cost calculation. The regulatory treatment of fossil-origin process CO₂ under RFNBO and recycled carbon fuel rules is restrictive and still evolving, so this needs checking case by case — but the volumes are real.
Add the cement and lime streams to the pulp, biogas and CHP streams and the Baltic carbon picture stops looking thin. It starts looking like the one input the region has more of than its neighbours.
The allocation decision comes before the capacity decision
The uncomfortable implication is that the Baltic's biomass debate has been running one step behind. The question was never how much biomass we can mobilise. It is which uses get it, and in what order, once everyone accepts there is not enough for all of them.
Answering that early is a competitive advantage, not a bureaucratic exercise. Support schemes, offtake structures and permitting all set defaults, and defaults harden fast. A tonne of biomass locked into low-value combustion by a subsidy written in 2026 is a tonne unavailable for e-fuels in 2035 — along with the carbon it carried.
Which is the practical takeaway for anyone building in this region. Map the carbon point sources near your electrolyser plans now — biogenic and unavoidable industrial alike — while they are unclaimed and cheap to secure. The biomass ceiling is not a reason for pessimism about the transition. It is the clearest argument anyone has made for why the hydrogen build-out has to be bigger than currently planned.
Source: LinkedIn post