UCL-Energy seminar: 'The Promise of Bioenergy', Professor Gail Taylor, University of Southampton

Turning green plants into liquid biofuels  or electricity and heat is controversial and yet the UK needs bioenergy if we are to meet our emissions reduction targets. Bioenergy crops can displace food crops and have  wide-ranging ‘indirect’ land use change impacts for land with a high ecosystem service value. It has even been suggested that the carbon footprint of bioenergy may be worse and not better than some fossil fuel chains.  This seminar will explore the potential of bioenergy produced largely in the UK, to overcome some of these controversies and contribute to an expanding industry that is sustainable,  revealing that the UK has the potential to deliver several million tonnes of feedstock per year, with limited detrimental impact on the environment or food production.  A case study for poplar trees suggests that biotechnological routes to tree improvement and GM trees could also contribute to the sustainable intensification of land for UK bioenergy.

About the speaker:

Professor Gail Taylor is Director of Research for Biological Sciences and co-Chair of the university-wide Energy group at the University of Southampton. She has been interested in sustainable bioenergy since 1990, when her first PhD student began work to parameterise a forestry model to predict bioenergy crop yield in current and future climates – the outputs of which now sit in the ETI EMSE model and are being used to underpin decision making for future technology developments in this area. She has published over 120 peer-review papers on bioenergy and allied topics and has an h index of 39. Her research on bioenergy extends from the molecular level to landscape-scale to work on the water footprint of bioenergy crop imports. She currently leads a 22 partner consortium funded by FP7, WATBIO (www.watbio.eu), aimed at developing new bioenergy crops for water-limited environments. She has participated in UKERC research on spatial mapping feedstock resources, she is PI on Carbo-BioCrop, a project to quantify the carbon footprint of bioenergy feedstocks and works as part of the ELUM and SUPERGEN consortia, all aimed to improve the sustainability and development of this source of renewable energy. She was founding subject editor of Global Change Biology Bioenergy and currently acts as associate editor on several bioenergy journals. @taylorlabsoton, www.taylorlab.co.uk,http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=p3fImD0AAAAJ&hl=en

We expect this event to be extremely popular, and places will be on a first come first served basis. If you are no longer able to attend please email as soon as possible energy-events@ucl.ac.uk

The presentation will promptly start at 5.30pm.

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