Supergen Bioenergy Hub

生物能源为英国的热能、运输燃料和电力提供了相当大比例的低碳能源供应。生物能源有可能在未来提供高得多的低碳能源，但这需要适当发展关键的使能技术和战略管理，以充分利用宝贵但有限的生物质资源。还必须承认，人们对生物能源系统的长期可持续性提出了重大关切，包括生物质生产的更广泛的社会和经济影响。该项目将为英国创建一个超级生物能源中心，将工业界、学术界和其他利益相关者聚集在一起，专注于与增加英国生物能源贡献相关的研究和知识挑战，以连贯、可持续和具有成本效益的方式实现战略环境目标。它将通过对生物能源采取“整体系统”的方法来实现这一目标，这样我们就可以专注于新技术在整个生产和利用链的背景下带来的好处。为了确保重点研究的快速传播和部署，将与工业伙伴和其他利益攸关方（包括政府机构）密切合作。该中心还将对生物能源采取明确的跨学科方法，确保我们解决重要问题，如土地利用变化的影响，不仅作为科学量化练习，而且要适当考虑社会和经济影响。该中心将开展前沿研究，以解决与生物能源部署相关的工程挑战，特别侧重于实现灵活的能源载体。因此，我们将开展核心研究以解决存在的问题，例如增加对生物质燃烧的科学认识，以改善环境排放，并开发焙烧（加热原料），这可以改善使用生物质的物流（从而提高成本）。然而，我们也将致力于更具战略性的长期选择；利用学术专业知识帮助行业解决迄今为止在气化等先进技术方面遇到的工程问题，评估生物质衍生的合成天然气作为减少天然气供应的低碳替代品的前景，并开发新技术，从生物质中生产更可持续的运输燃料。该项目将为英国提供许多不同的生物能源选择，这些选择有许多不同的成本和收益。因此，我们将特别关注正在开发的生物能源链的生态、经济和社会方面的评估。这将使我们能够为政府和其他利益相关者提供适当的科学证据和信息，以促进英国最可持续的生物能源系统的发展。

Bioenergy provides a significant proportion of the UK's low carbon energy supply for heat, transport fuel and electricity. There is scope for bioenergy to provide much higher levels of low carbon energy in future, but this requires appropriate development of key enabling technologies and strategic management to make the best use of the valuable, but finite, biomass resource. It must also be acknowledged that there have been significant concerns raised about the long term sustainability of bioenergy systems, including the wider social and economic impacts of biomass production. This project will create a Supergen Bioenergy hub for the UK which will bring together industry, academia and other stakeholders to focus on the research and knowledge challenges associated with increasing the contribution of UK bioenergy to meet strategic environmental targets in a coherent, sustainable and cost-effective manner. It will do this by taking a "whole systems" approach to bioenergy, so that we focus on the benefits that new technologies can bring within the context of the whole production and utilisation chain. In order to ensure focused research with rapid dissemination and deployment this will be done in close collaboration with industrial partners and other stakeholders, including government agencies. The hub will also take an expressly interdisciplinary approach to bioenergy, ensuring that we address important issues, such as the impacts of land-use change not just as scientific quantification exercises, but taking due account of the social and economic impacts. The hub will carry out leading edge research to address the engineering challenges associated with bioenergy deployment, with a particular focus on enabling flexible energy vectors. Therefore we will carry out core research to address existing problems, for example increasing scientific understanding of biomass combustion to improve environmental emissions and developing torrefaction (heating the feedstock), which could improve the logistics (and therefore costs) of using biomass. However, we will also work on more strategic, long term options; using academic expertise to help industry resolve the engineering problems experienced to date with some advanced technologies like gasification and assessing the prospects for biomass-derived synthetic natural gas as a low carbon alternative to diminishing natural gas supplies and developing new technologies to produce more sustainable transport fuels from biomass. The project will progress many different bioenergy options for the UK, which have many different costs and benefits. Therefore we will particularly focus on evaluating the ecological, economic and social aspects of the bioenergy chains being developed. That will allow us to provide appropriate scientific evidence and information to government and other stakeholders to facilitate development of the most sustainable bioenergy systems for the UK.