LUIE across sources
Context: Published in July 2022. Funded by USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Hatch Project 1010512, the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at UC Davis, and the UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship
Methodology:
- Currently global energy system uses just 0.4% of ice-free land compared to agriculture land use, which is using 30-38%
- This is likely going to change given increasing energy consumption and electrification
- This paper focuses on land-use intensity of energy (LUIE) and calculates LUIE using actual data from operational plants (excluding concentrated solar power because there aren’t enough operating plants to get an accurate sense of LUIE)
- LUIE is measured as hectares occupied per terawatt-hour of electricity generated in a given year [ha/TWh/y]
- Calculations are not including land usage for manufacturing or transmission
- LUIE is made up of indirect and direct land use intensity
- Indirect = fuel (e.g. coal storage)
- Direct = facility (e.g. coal plant)
- Land usage can be further split into spacing (entire area in the perimeter) and footprint (infrastructure)
- LUIE is made up of indirect and direct land use intensity
- Indirect = fuel (e.g. coal storage)
- Direct = facility (e.g. coal plant)
- Total LUIE for natural gas includes direct impacts from power plant infrastructure and indirect impacts from natural gas drilling and transportation infrastructure. Footprint LUIE represents the area covered by gas well pads, access roads, and pipelines. Spacing LUIE refers to the entire production field, including all the area in between well pads, even if that land does not have any structures or roads covering it.
- Calculations are not including land usage for manufacturing or transmission
- Further details about calculations for each power source are available here:
- Thorough research regarding the land-use of Carbon Capture and Storage plants is lacking, but the team used an assumption from a 2016 paper that CCS would increase the land footprint of a plant by 40%
Results:
- Middle bar = median
- Wind- and NG- are not including spacing and just footprint, whereas Wind+ and NG+ are including spacing
- BioRes is biomass is generated from residue and waste whereas BioDed is generated from dedicated biomass (i.e. growing something to convert into energy)