Sustainable bioenergy production with little carbon debt in the Loess Plateau of China

BACKGROUND: As a key strategy for mitigating global climate change, bioenergy production by reducing CO(2) emissions plays an important role in ensuring sustainable development. However, land-use change by converting natural ecosystems into energy crop field could create a carbon debt at the beginning. Thus, the potential carbon debt calculation is necessary for determining a promising bioenergy crop production, especially in the region rich of marginal land. RESULTS: Here, we used high-resolution historical land-use data to identify the marginal land available and to evaluate the carbon debt of planting Miscanthus in the Loess Plateau, China. We found that there were 27.6 Mha for energy production and 9.7 Mha for ecological restoration, with total annual production of 0.41 billion tons of biomass. We also found that soil carbon sequestration and total CO(2) mitigation were 9.3 Mt C year(−1) and 542 Mt year(−1), respectively. More importantly, the result showed that planting Miscanthus on marginal land in the Loess Plateau only took 0.97 years on average to repay the carbon debt. CONCLUSIONS: Our study demonstrated that Miscanthus production in suitable marginal land in the Loess Plateau can offer considerable renewable energy and mitigate climate change with little carbon debt. These results suggested that bioenergy production in the similar arid and semiarid region worldwide would contribute to carbon sequestration in the context of rapid climate change. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-016-0586-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.