BECCS pairs biomass power generation with carbon capture and storage. Fast-growing biomass absorbs atmospheric CO2 as it grows; burning it for power releases that same carbon back — making combustion itself roughly carbon-neutral. Capturing a fraction of the flue-gas CO2 before it reaches the atmosphere, and storing it underground, turns that neutral cycle net-negative. The governing mass balance is the same real BECCS relation as the 3D version:
Gross CO2 = feed_rate × emission_factor × capacity_factor
Captured = Gross CO2 × capture_efficiency (while the reservoir has room)
Vented = Gross CO2 − Captured (biogenic; reabsorbed by regrowth)
Net removal = sum of captured parcel masses, clamped at the reservoir cap
The two implementations diverge in how that removal is tracked. The 3D version integrates a single continuous accumulator every frame and clamps its total at 50 Mt — but its capture-rate readout keeps reporting the full instantaneous rate forever, even long after the reservoir is completely full and no more CO2 could physically be injected. This 2D model instead tracks individually-massed CO2 parcels (each ≈0.2 Mt): a parcel leaving the boiler is marked captured or vented probabilistically by the capture-efficiency slider, and only actually adds its mass to the reservoir if there is still room when it arrives — once the 50 Mt cap is reached, parcels already marked "captured" are physically rerouted to vent instead, the live capture-rate readout correctly drops to 0 t/h, and a counter tracks how many parcels this happened to. That is the behavior a full storage reservoir would force in reality.
- Biomass feed rate — dry tonnes of feedstock burned per year at full load.
- Capture efficiency — fraction of flue-gas CO2 pulled out in the amine absorption column (real plants: 85–95%).
- Capacity factor — fraction of the year the plant actually runs at rated load.
- Reservoir fill — captured CO2 mass accumulating parcel-by-parcel in a saline aquifer / depleted reservoir, shown against an illustrative 50 Mt local storage cap.
Real-world relevance: the IPCC's 1.5°C pathways rely on gigatonne-scale BECCS deployment by 2050 for net-negative emissions; the same amine-scrubbing capture stage modeled here is shared with fossil-fuel CCS, the difference being biogenic vs. fossil carbon in the flue gas. Drag to pan the flow diagram and scroll to zoom in on any stage of the process.