Drax Biomass Is A Green Con
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
It’s taken them a few years, but maybe the Dead Tree Press is beginning to catch up!
A £31billion scheme to subsidise a wood-burning power station with taxpayers’ money is a green con, claim environmentalists.
The power plant, to be built by Drax in Selby, North Yorkshire, is meant to help the Government meet its goal of ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions.
It will use ‘carbon capture’ technology to suck up the carbon dioxide produced when burning the wood, preventing it from entering the atmosphere.
To achieve this it will be entitled to receive £31.7billion in public money over the 25 years of its operation. This could add around £16 a year to the average UK household’s energy bill.
But Phil Macdonald of energy think-tank Ember, which analysed the Drax proposal, said: ‘If you are saying that burning wood is carbon neutral… it’s an accounting trick. We are about to waste an enormous amount of money.’
And the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, which represents Europe’s top scientists and Britain’s Royal Society, says woody biomass ‘may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change’.
Under UK rules, which have been adapted from EU law, burning wood is considered carbon neutral because trees take CO2 from the atmosphere to grow. Wood is also deemed renewable because trees can be replaced.
This entitles the new BECCS – Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage – power station to tax breaks and taxpayer money.
But critics say the wood for it will come from the world’s old growth forests and huge amounts of energy are used to dry it, turn it into pellets and ship it.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Where are XR when you need them?
Smashing up buildings that then creates extra emissions when they are repaired, but then that is eco-loons for you.
It’s obvious that however many trees Drax burns, it has to replace at least 1.2x as many to compensate. Is it? And it’s obvious that planting new trees takes many years to suck up the CO2 released from burning mature trees. So Drax clearly is adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere – AND ALWAYS WILL. Until it stops operating it cannot ever catch up – unless it is planting far more trees than it burns
I hope the wood is imported on tall ships.
Can anyone name a Green policy, belief or power source free of a co basis?
Sorry, typo: I mean CON basis.
If you consider that the whole CO2 / global warming thing is a con then everything done to try to avert it is based on a fraud.
And Drax was once the world’s cleanest and efficient coal fired power station, and there’s billions of tons of coal under the North sea!
So essentially, Drax could be burning very, very old wood. Isn’t that the same thing? 🙂
Much better, probably, considering all the drawbacks of wood harvesting, transport and irreplacabilty in the short run at least.
The only proviso with coal is its health and safety hazards.
There was or is a scheme to mine it from onshore without much manpower by tunnelling in some way, located near NE England, Co Durham or Northumberland.
This needs review,whatever the Greens may say.
Unfortunately, they are usually impervious to reason,
Oh for God’s sake Harry, be gone with your rational, logical thinking.
I believe that it was virtually built on a coal mine, so shipping costs were minimal.
So Drax is going to receive £1.3 billion a year in subsidies? For how much power?
Worse than that.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/eso-why-we-need-negative-emissions-net-zero
They are talking of 50-60mtCO2 removal via BECCS and 9.6GW of capacity. So call it £5-6bn p.a.
Brilliant business: get paid for producing Bio-CO2, and paid again for removing it. Pity that they are not applying this business skill to areas that would benefit!
£16 a year on energy bills is small change compared with what consumers will have to pay for heat pumps and insulation. And if you don’t do this, you will be unable to remortgage or sell your house. And people complain that Communist China is a totalitarian state. Will the insanity ever end?
Not if they believe idiots like Kirkup in the Spectator.
The UK is desperately short of houses (over 1.2 m short apparently)and still not building nearly enough (mainly because of building company monopolies). These regulations, that are all ready in use in the letting-sector, will further reduce the housing stock due to increased price. Air heat pumps are of little use in winter and no use without many GW of reliable power – probably need over 200 GW if all gas were replaced with electric.
Fortunately, the governments’ herd of unicorns is thriving and all will be well……..
The price of lumber has doubled and cement is unobtainable.
In 2020 Drax received £832 million in direct subsidies from HMG, tax breaks estimated at being worth a further £258 for their ‘carbon neutral’ thermal energy supplies and got paid for the power they produced. All whilst belching millions of tons of co2 into the atmosphere. Green economics in a nutshell.
Two bad bits of news
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/shareholder-activism-reaches-milestone-exxon-board-vote-nears-end-2021-05-26/
You can only hope they decide to stop supplying Washington, New York and California.
Meanwhile the Dutch court votes for economic suicide
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/dutch-court-orders-shell-set-tougher-climate-targets-2021-05-26/
As van Beurden notes, the only way to achieve that is to close large parts of the business.
Or perhaps invite an offer from Sinochem?
The money we all as tax payers its self will produce carbon dioxide since we will all work a little more ,trade a little more and produce product a little more …. all of which will consume power and generate carbon dioxide
Important thing to remember. Greens are protesting it not because it cuts down forests, not because it emits carbon dioxide, not because it’s expensive and subsidized. They are protesting it because it can provide reliable energy. Same way they are against nuclear and hydro, despite those being cheap and low carbon.
How on earth is cutting down North American trees, processing them into biomass, shipping them to the UK to be burnt by Drax considered carbon neutral? This entire process is a scam on the UK Tax Payer.
You can see that, I can see that!
It will also waste an enormous amount of its generated electricity too.
CCS has a large parasitic energy load, reducing the amount of electricity sent to the grid by approx 20% – 25%.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27063796
Did anybody need an, “energy think tank” (WTF))? To tell them burning good big trees is stupid.who pays for the think tank? I have a fish tank as smart as that.
“Since then, the cost of generating power from wind has fallen by more than 70 per cent. The cost of solar generation is down around 90 per cent.”
And the real total cost in the UK? Else very strange that electricity bills only go up as more of these things that are installed!
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-should-be-worried-about-steve-baker-not-dominic-cummings
I do hope he is being torn to shreds in the comments for such nonsense.
“‘If you are saying that burning wood is carbon neutral… it’s an accounting trick. We are about to waste an enormous amount of money.”
Indeed. Think about “biofuel” ethanol. Ponzi schemes?
We have to depend on our elected politicos to get the best deals.
Therefore we must withhold our votes from Grees or their sympathisers.
GreeNs not as mistyped above.
The logic of cutting down mature trees in the USA, drying them in kilns, pulverising them, re-constituting, them into pellets shipping them from the mid-West overland and then by ships across the Atlantic; all 7.5 million tons of them, to reduce CO2 ’emissions, totally escapes me! .
The ‘logic’ becomes even more tenuous given that the saplings planted to replace them, take 35 years to reach the same CO2 removal capacity as their predecessors. To compound the stupidity even further, their defunct root systems rot, releasing as much CO2 as was released by the burning of the trees themselves!
The fact that Drax, like all other coal-fired power stations was built on coal fields, so long journeys to transport the coal was unnecessary. Now CO2 capture is added to the insanity!
Do the morons who dream up these policies take their inspiration from Lewis Carroll novels?
“…inspiration from Lewis Carroll novels…”
Charles Dodgson was an accomplished mathematician and a robust logician. His day–job was tutoring at Oxford in these subjects He loathed crooked thinking, and he would have utterly despised the cowards and bullies that are ruining our society.
Alice is brave, and she is, above all, possessed of sound instincts.. She always returns to reality strengthened by her brushes with craziness:
“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size* by this time.) You are nothing but a pack of cards!”
Dodgson also ridiculed the “precautionary principle.” His cowardly Knight equips his horse with heavy iron anklets “in case the sharks bite!”
* MENTAL size, that is.
‘The power plant, to be built by Drax in Selby’. By when?
Weren’t we just told we could have Rolls Royce nukes at £2bn a pop, 10 by 2035, and 470MW each? At something north of 85% availability probably, with a lifetime in excess of 40 years, CO2 free, no trees need to die and here’s the thing – if one fails for some reason they don’t all fail at the same time! Unlike our sub 1GW today wind fleet. That would be more electricity than the whole of Drax provides, let alone any new bit, for the same money.
Come on RR, get that application started!
You and your common sense approach! Won’t you think of the dead unicorns?
The steaks are nice chargrilled and served in a green peppercorn sauce! But strangely unfulfilling.
And now we get another scam, and I would seriously quesrtion the use of wood., it is messy at best!
I think we did an exercise on the same subject a while back. We calculated that the amount of land required to service a stable feed to existing UK biomass generators was about the same area as Wales. I think it was in response to some eco lune saying we could grow our own biomass and expand it’s use to save transportation costs and get greener. He’d obviously given the matter some serious thought before spouting that green drivel.
Drax are using the pathetic performance from wind in the first quarter of this year to justify further investment by the UK Taxpayer in their company, both for biomass and hydro. Latest Press release here:
https://www.drax.com/press_release/experts-issue-weather-warning-for-britains-electricity-grid/
Perhaps the fact they have Rebecca Heaton on the Climate Change Committee makes the whole thing “carbon” neutral.
She certainly seems to manage to doctor the reality with her PhD.
Burning biomass is a complex issue. Depends on what’s being burned. For example wood pellets are most often made from waste products associated with lumber production. In most case these waste products would wither be burned or left to degrade either of which would release their CO2. So capturing their energy for fuel is a good thing–turning waste into fuel–without any negative CO2 consequences. This even for those of us who don’t buy iinto MMGW.
Indeed. Getting philosophical, coal and gas are free and just release CO2 that was once in the atmosphere. You just need to dig them up. Stuff that can provide energy is lying about but it costs to carry it to where it can do some good. Does it make sense to create wood pellets in the USA and ship them to Drax? I honestly don’t know.
I live on the edge of the National Forest and Charnwood forest (in the UK). Less than a mile from me is a a humongous pile of timber cleared from around the power lines that criss-cross this area. The logs are bigger than I can lift and down a track that needs a 4X4 to negotiate. I pay £80 for a bag of logs that lasts me the winter. Is that Drax writ large?
Sometimes what seems to make sense doesn’t and vice versa.
Hpoppel,
that is true but to make the large amounts of power that we need, it’s not feasible or economic to harvest waste products for large scale generation.
If the NZCs want to continue they ought to take Delingpole into account…
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/05/27/delingpole-bojos-net-zero-eco-tyranny-the-backlash-begins/
(I’m still banging away at the DT….more in hope than expectation.)
A bit more detail on some of the arithmetic here:
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/ember-drax-beccs-plant-could-cost-31-7bn-in-public-subsidies
£181/MWh!
Surely natural gas will also be regenerated (naturally) in time – it just takes somewhat longer than growing wood. So why do we need any of this eco posturing?
Off thread, but U.K. wind is 1.7% of a low demand. Saudi Arabia here we come.
O/T…A bit late to still be on here (!) but I’ve just seen the BBC’s coverage of the Dutch Shell court case, and they’re asserting the Paris Accord is ‘legally binding’.
We all know it absolutely is not. The whole thing is voluntary with zero enforceability whatsoever for any signatory nation. Roger Harrabin – or whoever wrote the report on behalf of the BBC, is either in error or is lying. (Harrabin reviews the verdict and doesn’t advise readers that ‘Paris’ is NOT legally binding.)
This seems to me an entirely biased, pro-eco verdict. Regardless of any virtuous intent surely it’s not for a court to order a company to comply with regulations that don’t legally exist!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57257982
” the wood for it will come from the world’s old growth forests ”
This is not a good argument. The wood will come from trees, but if you define “old growth” to mean OLD, I’d have to see the map and the numbers. I’ll guess the pellets will come from planted and managed (like carrots) tree plantations.
Call me skeptical.
Burning wood rather than coal or gas (or going nuclear) is nuts.
Crass careless thoughtlessness, corruption, ignorance, stupidity and utter waste inform the whole “Green” decarbonisation mess.
Sounds as if the people in charge are unfit for purpose.
It would reduce the shambles if the CCCommittee and the likes of Ed Milliband and so many more were relieved of any involvement as part of repeal of the underlying legal basis of this sorry fiasco.
Of course those making vast monies and the UN would squeal but the public should be demanding an end to the scam.
Perhaps they soon will.?
As a thought, the main value of the technically-mad subsidy of wood is that it allows Drax to stay operational while the other coal stations are stupidly being closed. If / when the madness of wind and solar ends, we will need both storage and reliable power. Drax can offer several months of storage, albeit at only about 4 GW output, if returned to coal.
Trump legislated for the US to keep its coal fired power stations for the reason of national security: don’t know whether Biden has reversed that. Apart from hydro power only coal and nuclear power offer any long-term storage against international upheavals.
The local MP’s views seem to be hard to find – I wonder why
Any one read the constitution of the WWF recently ? It would surprise me if the objects of this wildlife charity have not been modified over the years and now come close to compromising its charitable status. To retain public support and funding for any large lobbying organisation with significant establishment costs it is necessary to find fresh evidence of abomination to draw to the public attention. I wonder what the Charity Commission make of this diminishing concern for widlife and the slide into self righteousness. Doubtless the WWF will claim that everything concerns wildlife.
Once upon a time “WWF” was the World Wildlife Fund. I think it is only that now in North America.
Elsewhere it is the World Wide Fund for Nature, but still uses WWF – not WWF-f-N.
I don’t have the time right now to search this up.
I have long ago taken the group off my “to donate to” list.
On current world experience it is not possible to put an accurate price on CCS, however if one assumed that the captured carbon was worth the same as the tax on emitters, about £ 50 / tonne, a 1 t/h removal and storage unit would “earn” £ 400k/y. Now 1 t/h carbon equates to about 24,000 MWh / y electricity generation which at £150 / MWh = £ 3.6m /y. Although 25 % of that may be needed for the CCS, say 6,000 MWh/y which at £50 / MWh equates to £300k / y: looks like a nice little earner to me, especially if the government pay for the storage bit…… and Drax buy the electricity at the lowest grid price of course. By the time that this was built the carbon tax will exceed £ 100 / t anyway. Who said that Drax could not print money?
another source for the £31bn claim
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/ember-drax-beccs-plant-could-cost-31-7bn-in-public-subsidies
Ember: Drax BECCS plant could cost £31.7bn in public subsidies
26 May 2021, 11:38Drax’s proposed bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) plant could cost £31.7 billion in public subsidies according to a new report from Ember.