Don't Readily Accept eXcuses

A dirty secret barely hidden

Does the British state really give a sniff for CO2 emissions? You’d think so, given the ballyhoo they make about it. But like so much of Britain’s contemporary politics, it looks performative rather than effective. Consider, for example, Drax.

The Drax power station in North Yorkshire it supplies about 6% of Britain’s total electricity supply, with a capacity of 3,906 megawatts (MW) and almost all the power it produces comes from burning compressed wood pellets. It’s an immense facility with a gargantuan appetite for wood pellets. Virtually every day shipments arrive in ports at Immingham, Hull, Newcastle or Liverpool, each carrying around 62,000 tonnes of wood pellets – enough to keep the boilers going for two and a half days.

It claims using biomass pellets “reduces our carbon emissions by 80% compared to coal”. Which is why Drax advertises itself as ‘the largest decarbonisation project in Europe’.

Be warned: you the taxpayer are on the hook for this. In 2020 Drax received £832mn in direct government subsidies for its biomass operations. In addition, it could claim an estimated £258mn in carbon tax-breaks. You’re paying big time.

On the face of it, Drax’s claim to be decarbonising at all is odd, because burning wood is a far less carbon-efficient process than, say, burning coal. And dirtier for the air too. (Which is why the government wants to discourage wood-burning stoves.) The bald facts are that, despite its claims, a biomass-powered Drax actually produces more CO2 than a coal-powered Drax of the same size. More CO2 comes out of its stacks, not less.

What magic calculus is it that can turn more CO2 into less CO2?

It’s the magic calculus of biomass, as explained in detail by this article in Physics World.

There are two arguments upon which the magic calculus turns:

1. The carbon released when wood pellets are burned is recaptured instantly by new growth, and;

2. The biomass being burned is waste that would have released carbon dioxide naturally when it rotted down

Subtract the CO2 totals from those two arguments from the CO2 actually released when burning the pellets, and hey presto, you can claim an 80% reduction in net CO2 emissions. Even though you are actually emitting more CO2.

So those two arguments had better be right. But are they? The first one - that the CO2 burned will be recaptured by new tree growth - comes with an obvious problem. It is far quicker for Drax to burn a pellet than it is for a tree to grow one. That time lag between when Drax burns the pellet and when a new tree has sequestered a corresponding amount of CO2 is called the carbon debt payback time.

The bad news is that for the type of trees in Southeastern US, which supply some 60% of Drax’s pellets, “Under the best-case scenario, when all harvested land is allowed to regrow as forest, the researchers found that burning wood pellets creates a carbon debt, with a payback time of between 44 and 104 years.”

Forty-four to 104 years! That’s a three-generation mortgage on that carbon debt. After which today’s Drax burnings may be made good by nature. That’s how carbon-neutral Drax’s biomass operations are.

For reference, in the wild CO2 emitted today will last between 300-1000 years.

The situation for the second argument is even worse. Remember the argument is that the biomass being burned is basically waste, including sawdust, the unusable tops of trees, young scrub growth. The problem for this is that we know for sure this simply isn’t true.

One of Drax’s principal North America suppliers is Eviva Biomass. Now, to be fair, Enviva is currently engaged on many fronts in proving itself a good corporate citizen, and a trustworthy custodian of North America’s forests. But there’s a reason for that: a few years ago, Enviva did a ‘track and trace’ exercise on every ton of wood it made into pellets. It found that 81% of the wood came from standing forests, and moreover, 58% of their product came from hardwood trees. In short, forests are being felled to make Drax’s pellets, including (in Drax’s 2021 Annual Report) ‘old growth forests’.

Lord alone knows what the CO2 payback period is for old growth hardwood forests. But it’s sure to be longer than the 44-104 years for ‘rapidly growing’ fir and pine.

But even if this were not the case, it turns out even if the pellets were really made just of waste which would otherwise emit CO2 slowly whilst rotting on the forest floor, burning them it in pellets produces “a net emissions impact of 55–79% after 10 years.”

Once again: more CO2 not less.

And there’s another problem, because accounting for CO2 emitted by trees rotting on the forest floor misses a major part of the story. Trees aren’t just above ground; the root system itself can be as big as, or bigger than, the tree above the ground. And it turns out there is a big difference between how the soil biosphere processes a root system of an dying elderly tree, and the root system from the stump left behind after above-ground decapitation. In the former case, the nutrients get slowly dissipated and shared around with other members of the wider forest body. In the latter case, they get eaten up by bugs, which fart the CO2 back into the air above ground.

I don’t know whether I’m more outraged by the environmental catastrophe Drax’s biomass-burning perpetrates, or the willingness of Britain’s governors to incubate it. After all, the facts aren’t hidden, and as you can see from the links in this article, they mainly come from independent scientists or the companies themselves. There’s no secret about what’s going on in Drax. Government can’t not know.

So where’s the outrage?

Where’s your outrage? Once again, dear taxpayer, don’t forget you are paying for this: in 2020, Drax received £832mn in direct government subsidies for its biomass operation. To that you can add an estimated tax-break of around £258mn for its carbon-cutting efforts. I’m not making this up.

So your personal contribution to this mess is about £15 a year. Your children too.

A profound lack of seriousness - no, it’s worse, a lack of basic democratic decency - is written throughout this entire supply chain, from pellet-makers to energy/environmental regulators, to the politicians who we elect as representatives. It is our democratic right, and I’d argue duty, to demand our governors treat us, and themselves, with seriousness and decency. Drax is just another warning of the colossal damage done and expense incurred in its absence.