Evaluation of biomass utilization pathways – a methodological framework

Biomass is a limited resource with growing demand across sectors, creating the need to identify utilization pathways that deliver both financial returns and societal benefits. Current assessments tend to focus on economic performance and global warming potential, often overlooking broader environmental externalities for society. Also, removed and avoided CO ₂ eq emissions are often inconsistently handled. These limitations reduce the ability of existing assessments to guide strategic biomass allocation and policy design. This study addresses these limitations by developing a novel methodological framework that integrates techno-economic analysis, life cycle assessment, and the monetization of environmental externalities to derive two central metrics: net private benefit (NPB) and net social benefit (NSB). By expressing all results per unit of biomass input, the framework enables consistent comparison across pathways with heterogeneous outputs, such as heat, biochar, and carbon removal credits. It explicitly distinguishes between types of emissions and resource use, including avoided and removed emissions. The framework also captures trade-offs across multiple environmental impact categories and links private and societal perspectives, providing actionable insights for investment and policy decisions. To demonstrate the framework’s feasibility, it is applied to miscanthus utilization in Germany, comparing bioenergy (BE) and biochar carbon removal (BCR). Results show that BE generates positive NPB and avoids emissions and resource use, but does not remove CO ₂ eq emissions permanently, while BCR provides long-term CO ₂ eq emission removal but negative NPB. NSB, however, is positive for both pathways, illustrating how the framework identifies synergies and conflicts between private incentives and societal value. Overall, the framework enables a holistic assessment of biomass utilization pathways, supporting strategic prioritization and policy alignment. By integrating economic and environmental dimensions, applying rigorous emissions and resource use accounting, as well as harmonizing metrics, it provides decision-makers with a structured basis to allocate scarce biomass resources efficiently according to private and social benefits.