Biomass is used most heavily in the developing world, where billions of people burn wood, charcoal, crop waste, and animal dung for cooking, heating, and lighting. Roughly a third of the global population still relies on these traditional biomass fuels as their primary household energy source. But biomass also plays growing roles in electricity generation, industrial heat, construction materials, and even jet fuel. The picture of “where” biomass gets used shifts dramatically depending on whether you measure by the number of people involved, the sophistication of the technology, or the total energy produced.
Traditional Household Burning Dominates by Population
When people talk about where biomass is used the most, the honest starting point is the billions of households across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia that burn raw organic material every day. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, roughly four out of five people rely on biomass fuels for household energy needs like cooking and heating water. Across the broader developing world, the figure is about one in three people globally, burning wood, dung, or charcoal in simple stoves or open fires.
This is a staggering volume of biomass use that often gets overlooked in conversations focused on power plants or biofuels. It happens at small scale in individual homes but adds up to the largest single category of biomass consumption on Earth. The fuel is gathered locally, often by women and children, and burned with minimal combustion efficiency. The pattern persists not because these fuels are optimal but because they are free or cheap and because cleaner alternatives remain out of reach for cost, infrastructure, or cultural reasons.
The Health Toll of Indoor Biomass Burning
Traditional biomass burning comes with serious health consequences that are easy to miss if you live somewhere with electric stoves. Burning wood, dung, or crop residue indoors produces thick smoke loaded with fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and other pollutants. This indoor air pollution is linked to higher rates of pneumonia, tuberculosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, low birthweight, cataracts, and cardiovascular problems in both adults and children.1PubMed Central. Indoor air pollution from biomass fuel smoke is a major health concern in the developing world The exposure is chronic and cumulative, affecting the people who spend the most time near the cookstove, typically women and young children.
Field monitoring in rural Kenya found that over 80 percent of people tested showed signs of impaired lung function, alongside high self-reported rates of respiratory illness.2PubMed Central. Assessment of the biomass related indoor air pollution in Kwale district in Kenya using short term monitoring These health effects are concentrated in communities that have the fewest resources to deal with them, creating a cycle where biomass dependence both reflects and reinforces poverty. Efforts to transition households to cleaner cooking fuels or improved cookstoves have been underway for decades, but progress in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia has been slow.
Agricultural Residues as a Major Feedstock
Beyond household burning, agricultural residues represent one of the largest pools of available biomass worldwide. Every rice harvest leaves behind husks; every sugarcane pressing produces bagasse; every timber operation generates sawdust and offcuts. In countries with large agricultural sectors, these residues are abundant enough to function as a serious energy feedstock.
India illustrates the scale well. The country produces an estimated surplus of about 6.9 million tons of rice husk per year and roughly 45.8 million tons of sugarcane bagasse, corresponding to a combined power-generation potential of nearly 6,000 megawatts.3Fuel. Pyrolysis of rice husk, bagasse and wood chips blends: Distributed activation energy modelling and pyrolysate composition analysis That is enough electricity to power millions of homes. Similar patterns exist across Southeast Asia, where palm oil residues, coconut shells, and rice straw are all used or potentially available. In Brazil, sugarcane bagasse is already a major fuel for the sugar and ethanol industries, burned on-site to generate process heat and electricity.
The appeal of agricultural residues is that they already exist as waste. Nobody has to plant a dedicated energy crop or clear forest; the biomass is a byproduct of food production that would otherwise decompose in fields or get burned in the open. The challenge is collection, transportation, and processing. Scattered smallholder farms in rural regions make it expensive to gather residues at the scale needed for industrial use.
Co-firing Biomass in Coal Power Plants
One of the fastest-growing uses of biomass in the energy sector is co-firing, where biomass is blended with coal in existing power stations. The idea is straightforward: replace some percentage of the coal with wood pellets, agricultural waste, or other organic material, and you cut the plant’s net carbon emissions without building new infrastructure from scratch.
Indonesia has identified potential for biomass co-firing across 114 coal power plant units with a combined capacity of about 18 gigawatts, which would require around 9 million tons of biomass per year.4IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. Potential of biomass and coal co-firing power plants in Indonesia: a PESTEL analysis In Malaysia, where coal generates nearly 60 percent of electricity, researchers have investigated co-firing with sawn timber waste from the Sabah region, though logistical inefficiencies in collection, transportation, and pelletization currently limit the recommended substitution rate to about 4 percent.5IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. Potential of cofiring at coal power plant with Sabah sawn timber waste
Europe, particularly the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, has pushed co-firing much further. The UK’s Drax power station famously converted most of its boilers from coal to wood pellets, making it one of the largest biomass-burning facilities in the world. The European approach has been more aggressive partly because of carbon pricing policies and renewable energy mandates, but also because the supply chain for wood pellets from North America and the Baltic states is well established. Co-firing is attractive to policymakers because it uses existing grid connections and power plant sites, avoiding the long permitting timelines of building new facilities.
Industrial Heat and Cement Production
Electricity is only part of the energy picture. Many industrial processes need high-temperature heat, and biomass is increasingly looked at as a way to decarbonize those sectors. Cement manufacturing is a prime example. The cement industry is one of the hardest sectors to clean up because most of its carbon emissions come not just from burning fuel but from the chemical process of turning limestone into clinite, which releases CO₂ no matter what energy source you use.
Biomass occupies an unusual position here. Unlike solar or wind, it can directly replace fossil fuels in the kiln and potentially offset some of the process emissions by substituting clinker with biomass ash.6Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. Sustainable transition towards biomass-based cement industry: A review Roughly 80 to 90 percent of cement’s emissions come from limestone calcination and fuel combustion combined, so any technology that addresses both has outsized value. Several cement plants in Europe and South America have already begun substituting a share of their fossil fuel input with biomass, including agricultural waste and municipal solid waste.
Beyond cement, industries like brick-making, food processing, and textile drying use biomass for process heat in many developing countries. In parts of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, wood and crop residues remain the default fuel for small-scale manufacturing simply because fossil fuels are expensive or difficult to source reliably.
Biogas from Organic Waste
A less visible but rapidly expanding use of biomass is anaerobic digestion, where microorganisms break down organic material in the absence of oxygen to produce biogas, primarily methane. The feedstocks range from food waste and sewage sludge to livestock manure and crop residues. The technology works at scales from small household digesters common in rural China and India to large centralized plants in Germany and Scandinavia.
Research continues to push the efficiency of these systems. Studies on digesting pre-treated municipal organic waste have shown that coupling biogas production with reuse of the liquid digestate as fertilizer creates a sequential biorefinery that simultaneously converts waste, produces renewable energy, and recycles nutrients back into agriculture.7PubMed. Technical, environmental, and economic assessment of anaerobic digestion of pre-treated municipal organic waste for energy production and reuse of liquid digestate Other work has explored co-digesting chicken manure with municipal organic solid waste, finding that blending feedstocks and adding iron oxide particles can substantially boost methane yields.8PubMed Central. Highly efficient biomethane production from chicken manure and municipal organic solid waste using magnetite: converting waste into energy
Biogas is especially significant because it solves two problems at once: waste disposal and energy production. In countries with rising urban populations generating more organic waste, anaerobic digestion offers a way to keep that waste out of landfills, where it would decompose and release methane anyway, uncontrolled. The methane captured in a digester can be burned for electricity, upgraded to pipeline-quality natural gas, or used as vehicle fuel.
Mass Timber in Construction
Biomass is not just a fuel. One of its most promising non-energy applications is in construction, where engineered wood products like cross-laminated timber and glulam are gaining ground as alternatives to concrete and steel. These mass timber products are increasingly adopted precisely because they carry lower embodied emissions than the conventional materials they replace.9Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering. Advancing Mass Timber Construction: Insights into Hygrothermal Behavior and Field Monitoring of Engineered Wood Structures
The carbon math is compelling. Using mass timber instead of concrete and steel in new buildings taller than three stories in the United States alone could provide combined carbon benefits of roughly 10 to 17 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent per year over the period from 2020 to 2070, factoring in both the avoided emissions from not producing concrete and steel and the carbon stored within the wood itself.10PubMed Central. The potential use of mass timber in mid-to high-rise construction and the associated carbon benefits in the United States That is a significant chunk of building-sector emissions, and it comes from a material that can be sustainably harvested and regrown.
Mass timber construction is most advanced in Scandinavia, Austria, Canada, and parts of the United States and Australia, where building codes have been updated to allow taller wood structures. The technology is still niche compared to the overall construction market, but it represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about biomass: not as something to burn, but as something to build with and keep intact for decades, locking away carbon in the process.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel and Other Advanced Uses
Perhaps the frontier application getting the most attention is sustainable aviation fuel. Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to electrify because batteries are too heavy for long-haul flight, which makes liquid biofuels one of the few realistic paths to lower-carbon air travel. Researchers are working on converting various forms of biomass into biocrude that can be refined into jet fuel.
Recent work on hydrothermal liquefaction, a process that uses heat and pressure to convert wet biomass into an oil-like product, has shown that blending food waste with plant-based materials like cellulose can increase biocrude yields by about 12 percent compared to processing either feedstock alone. The improvement preferentially benefits the jet fuel fraction, which made up nearly 23 percent of the total carbon yield in the best-performing blends.11PubMed Central. Synergistic Interactions During Co-Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Food Waste and Biomass Model Compounds for Increased Sustainable Aviation Fuel Production The results are still at laboratory scale, but they point to a future where municipal food waste and agricultural residues could partially feed the aviation fuel supply chain.
Beyond fuels, biomass is a feedstock for biochemicals, bioplastics, and pharmaceutical intermediates. The broader vision, often described as the bioeconomy, imagines a world where plant-based materials replace petroleum not only in the gas tank but in the plastics, solvents, and synthetic fibers that permeate modern life. That transition is still in early stages, but it helps explain why governments and companies invest in biomass infrastructure well beyond its traditional role as a simple fuel.
Land, Water, and Ecological Trade-offs
Scaling up biomass use is not a free lunch. Every ton of biomass comes from somewhere, and that somewhere involves land, water, and ecosystems. A comprehensive review of bioenergy’s interactions with sustainability goals found that the effects are genuinely mixed. Looking across dozens of studies, researchers found roughly equal numbers of synergies and trade-offs between bioenergy and other environmental goals. The most frequent tensions involved clean water and biodiversity: using land for energy crops can disrupt water systems and threaten habitats, while perennial energy crops can sometimes improve soil health compared to annual food crops.12Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. Land use for bioenergy: Synergies and trade-offs between sustainable development goals
The review also found that first-time cultivation of dedicated energy crops on non-agricultural land can worsen soil erosion and contribute to soil degradation, and that without careful planning, energy crop expansion can drive competition with food production and lead to loss of forests and biodiversity-rich areas. These trade-offs matter because they set a ceiling on how much biomass the world can realistically harvest without creating new environmental problems.
Water is another constraint that gets less attention than it deserves. Global modeling of a scenario where large-scale irrigated biomass plantations are used for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage found that while such an approach could limit global warming to 1.5°C, the area and number of people living under severe water stress would roughly double compared to today, potentially even exceeding the water-stress impact of climate change itself.13Nature Communications. Irrigation of biomass plantations may globally increase water stress more than climate change In other words, solving the carbon problem with biomass could create a water problem of equal or greater magnitude.
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage
Despite those risks, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage remains a central feature of most climate models that limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. The concept is straightforward in theory: grow plants that absorb CO₂, burn them for energy, capture the CO₂ before it enters the atmosphere, and store it underground permanently. The result is net-negative emissions, actively pulling carbon out of the air rather than just reducing what goes in.
One practical pathway being explored is retrofitting existing coal power plants for biomass co-firing with carbon capture. This approach reuses existing power infrastructure and grid connections rather than building from scratch, which lowers costs and speeds deployment.14GCB Bioenergy. Retrofitting coal‐fired power plants with biomass co‐firing and carbon capture and storage for net zero carbon emission: A plant‐by‐plant assessment framework As coal plants face retirement schedules around the world, converting them to biomass with carbon capture offers a way to maintain local employment and energy capacity while fundamentally changing the emissions profile.
The catch is that carbon capture technology remains expensive and unproven at scale. Only a handful of facilities worldwide currently operate with full carbon capture, and none at the scale that climate models envision. The biomass supply constraints discussed earlier compound the challenge: you need enormous volumes of sustainably sourced biomass, reliable capture technology, and suitable geological storage sites, all in the same region. Climate modelers tend to be more optimistic about this combination than the engineers and economists working on individual pieces of it.
Why the Geography of Biomass Use Is Shifting
The traditional map of biomass use is dominated by the developing world, where households burn raw organic material out of necessity. But the geography is changing. European and North American demand for wood pellets has created a global trade in processed biomass, with pellets shipped from the southeastern United States, Russia, and the Baltic states to power stations in the UK, Netherlands, Denmark, and Japan. Meanwhile, countries like Indonesia and Malaysia are exploring co-firing as a bridge strategy to reduce coal dependence without abandoning existing power infrastructure.4IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. Potential of biomass and coal co-firing power plants in Indonesia: a PESTEL analysis
In sub-Saharan Africa, the dominant challenge remains transitioning from traditional biomass burning to cleaner alternatives. The region’s heavy dependence on biomass for household energy persists because clean cooking solutions require not just new stoves or fuels but also the knowledge, supply chains, and affordability to sustain them.15Environmental Science & Policy. Required knowledge for clean cooking transition: The case of Tanzania China and India occupy a middle ground: both have massive agricultural residue resources, growing industrial demand for biomass, and ongoing rural populations still dependent on traditional biomass fuels. The tension between biomass as a low-tech survival fuel and biomass as a high-tech climate solution plays out differently in each region, but it is present nearly everywhere.