Comments on: Budget announcements: the industry responds

By: Rob Palgrave

Rob Palgrave — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:18:53 +0000

As other readers have noted above, Britain’s dirty ‘renewable’ energy secret is Drax and Lynemouth power stations where millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets are burnt each year. Together these two inefficient power stations supply over 4% of the UK’s total electricity. A rational discussion of UK energy future must recognise and deal with the flawed climate accounting that treats Big Biomass as low carbon, and address the social and environmental impacts that result from woodfuel production.

Put simply the Big Biomass model is a con-trick – it’s no more than a giant carbon-offsetting scheme. It purports to be low-carbon on the basis that emissions from burning trees will eventually be absorbed from the atmosphere by future tree growth. The biomass power companies that claim to be low-carbon and which are handsomely rewarded by UK government subsidies have no responsibility to replant and grow new trees, or to ensure that others do. Instead there is a vague and impossible-to-monitor idea that as long as overall forest carbon stocks are increasing, it’s OK to take and burn as much as the power stations require.

Imagine the uproar if a generator proposed that we re-start coal burning in the UK because they had struck a deal to protect existing forests or to plant new trees and thereby offset their carbon emissions?

Maybe the dial is moving. This week, UK Govt Minister Lord Hunt at least admitted in a House of Lords debate that Big Biomass at Drax is offsetting:

“It is true that Drax is an emitter of carbon but that is offset—netted off—by the new forestry growth that takes place and absorbs the carbon. This is not a fanciful notion by the Government; the International Energy Agency, the IPCC and the Committee on Climate Change all accept that biomass, as long as sustainability criteria are applied and accepted, is in that way a low-carbon renewable energy.”

(https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2024-11-11/debates/D3208C79-D529-4755-AC07-AF835D5FE99F/DraxPowerLimitedOfgemInvestigation)

What the noble Lord failed to add is that the undisputed carbon emissions from Drax and Lynemouth are not simply written down to zero by the bodies he cites, but they are instead added to the carbon emissions produced in the countries supplying the wood fuel, such as the USA. Under the adopted UNFCCC accounting rules these emissions appear in the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry sector of the GHG inventory in the country producing the biomass. It is this entirely arbitrary accounting treatment that allows UK government to dodge responsibility for these emissions and for the other harms resulting from Big Biomass.

Time for some honesty Mr Miliband!

By: James Hewitt

James Hewitt — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 21:24:10 +0000

Government should not underwrite the performance of “decarbonisation” projects promoted by the industries which have caused (and sustain) the problem, nor should it pay compensation for delays to projects involving industrial clusters.
it would be prudent to assume that proposals to capture post-combustion CO2 at power stations will not achieve sustained capture rates anything like those required in the UK government’s “Net Zero by 2050″ plans. Courts have twice judged those plans insufficient. The Climate Change Committee repeatedly notes that progress is well behind schedule.
Those rates should be net of the facilities’ energy penalty – and supply chain emissions upstream and downstream. The net amounts, especially for power stations which burn imported wood pellets, may be paltry – and unsuitable for carbon removal credits in advance of any post-capture permanent disposal.
Proposals to capture post combustion CO2 at energy-from-waste facilities are implausible / cynical. As with those proposed for Drax power station, their benefit is overestimated. They wrongly deem that post-combustion CO2 from biogenic material (regardless of its country of origin) is carbon neutral and the entity which captures that CO2 should be credited with negative emissions (regardless of the country of its permanent disposal).
Proponents of such facilities are clearly irrational when the assert that if government, the IPCC, and others state that those facilities are needed then they will work as proposed.
The government’s £22 billion budget for such proposals is more likely to be a hinderance to UK – and global – decarbonisation than a help.

By: Michelle Connolly

Michelle Connolly — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 01:18:18 +0000

I live in an area where Drax sources raw material to make pellets that get shipped to the UK to be burned for energy. Drax is currently using material that came from rare old growth forests in northern British Columbia. This is fundamentally unsustainable. Our remaining natural forests have been in development for millennia and support complex food webs made up of species that are being driven into rarity by industrial forestry. Drax is ‘helping’ the destruction of our last natural forests in BC by obtaining woody material from areas that were habitat for northern goshawk, fisher, grizzly bear and other life forms we care about here. Drax should be charged with ecocide for what they are doing in British Columbia.

By: Anne

Anne — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:23:28 +0000

Whilst new funding and a sense of transitional energy urgency is more than welcomed and long overdue, there is no mention of existing subsidies which could be reutilised. I am referring to Drax, which has received £7bn since 2012 and will require yet more for carbon capture. The Guardian’s energy correspondents headline “Drax will keep on raising carbon levels until 2050, study says” provides plenty of reasons for such reallocations.

By: Jack Spruill

Jack Spruill — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:10:31 +0000

I appreciate reading the comments from the twelve organizations about energy and environment issues in the Chancellor’s budget announcement. Thank you for soliciting those comments.

I am disappointed that none of those twelve comments mentioned the fact that since 2012 the government has paid Drax subsidies totalling £ 7 billion to burn trees to generate electricity. https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/09/why-the-uks-biggest-carbon-emitter-receives-billions-in-green-subsidies

Most of those trees are being clear cut from forests in British Columbia and the southeast of the US.

I have first hand knowledge of the logging and pellet manufacturing in North Carolina for Drax that is being done by its largest pellet supplier, Enviva, which is now in bankruptcy. The logging being done in North Carolina to feed the four Enviva pellet plants there and the one just across the border in southeast Virginia is almost exclusively of naturally-generated, mixed-species hardwood forests. Some of these forests are old growth and some are in wetlands. There is no requirement that the clear-cut acreage be set out in trees, or even that the acreage remain as forest land to begin the 50+ year process of successional regeneration to again become a mixed-species, mixed-age forest.