National Audit Office Questions Drax’s Greenwashing
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Britain’s biggest renewable power station cannot prove it is burning wood from sustainable sources despite receiving billions of pounds in taxpayer handouts, the Government’s audit body has said.
The Drax plant in Selby, North Yorkshire, receives subsidies to help generate 6pc of Britain’s electricity, which it achieves by burning 7m tonnes of wood a year.
Drax has claimed that the wood is sourced sustainably, although the National Audit Office (NAO) has sought to question this: “The Government cannot demonstrate that its current arrangements are adequate to give it confidence that industry is meeting sustainability standards.”
Gareth Davies, head of the watchdog, said: “If biomass is going to play a key role in the transition to net zero, the Government needs to be confident that the industry is meeting high sustainability standards.
“However, the Government has been unable to demonstrate its current assurances are adequate to provide confidence in this regard,” Davies added.
The scrutiny follows last week’s triumph for Drax after Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho approved a scheme to bolt two carbon capture plants onto its four generating units, potentially stripping out almost all their CO2 emissions.
Drax claims the scheme will allow it to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces – making it the world’s first carbon-negative thermal power station.
Green activists claim it will destroy forests and cost consumers billions of pounds.
However, Drax’s sustainability claims are also under investigation by energy regulator Ofgem, which last May opened an enforcement case to examine how it was reporting the data used to calculate green subsidies.
A Drax spokesperson said all its wood is sourced sustainably: “We fully support the review process and look forward to working with the Government on this. It’s essential that sustainability reporting and criteria are robust and fit for purpose.
“We are committed to ensuring the biomass we source delivers positive outcomes for the climate, for nature and for the communities in which we operate.”
However, Greenpeace UK’s policy director Dr Doug Parr said that burning trees could never be sustainable: “The NAO is unconvinced that the enormous flow of subsidies to Drax are doing the job they’re intended for – cutting carbon emissions.
“We would go further – investigations into the sources of Drax’s fuel indicate that on lifecycle analysis, it may be higher carbon than fossil-fuelled power stations, as well as causing ecological damage, and the review the NAO are calling for would demonstrate this.”
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero made clear it would continue to support biomass burning. A spokesman said: “Our stringent sustainability criteria are in line with internationally recognised standards.
“Biomass will provide a key role in a more secure, clean energy sector. It delivered 9pc of the UK’s total energy supply in 2022, with generators only legally receiving subsidies if they proved they have complied with our strict rules.”
Mark Sommerfeld, a director at the Association for Renewable Energy and Clean Technology, said biomass will continue to have an important role to play in delivering net zero.
He said: “Sustainability is and must always be at the heart of using any bioresources, so while it’s right to keep this under regular review, the existing criteria developed by the Government provides a strong basis for moving forward.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/24/drax-biomass-power-station-greenwashing-concerns/
If it’s obvious to Greenpeace, it must surely be obvious to the rest of us that Drax is doing nothing at all to reduce CO2 emissions, while at the same time being responsible for terrible environmental devastation.
Without the obscene subsidies already paid out, Drax would have gone bankrupt years ago, so anything they say in their own defence can be ignored.
And as we have long known, the UK Govt is only interested in box ticking, so fictious emissions cuts from Drax are fine, whether they really exist or not.
And so this lunacy will carry on!
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“All this nonsense” has nowhere to go, thank goodness – and at last!
The net is – very slowly, closing in……..
Sorry, just a daydream. But we can hope – and keep on bu*****ng-on.
GreenPiss, and the rest of them, were creaming their jeans when Drax turned to wood. Ah! Wonderful! The carbon dioxide from a few odd twigs and branches will help another mighty oak to grow! Carbon Neutral! Geddit!?!
Took ’em all of 5 years or more to suss out that burning a tree in 15 seconds didn’t tie in with the tree taking 50 – 100 years to grow back. And that’s without wondering how much “fossil fuel” it takes to fell, pelletise, dry, ship and store the chips.
Me, I’d be happy for Alok Sharma to giggle at blowing Drax to smitherines, especially if the venal, lying toads who foisted this nonsense on us were atop the chimney. But I guess it might be feasible to convert it back to coal and run it again. The coal would have to be imported, obviously. A new Advanced Ultra Super-Critical Coal Plant would be far better. And cheaper than these useless CCS plants.
The only reason they started throwing money at CCS was to make coal more expensive than gas. And wind. They destroyed coal anyway, and are trying to destroy gas. So what use is CCS?
Will anyone involved in Drax & wood pellets end in jail?
For what? Government plays stupid games, and wins stupid prizes. Drax isn’t the bad guy; the government is.
“It’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.” — W. C. Fields
So the Drax guys are just complicit in Government Games and so that’s OK. Only an independent investigation of the goverment is necessary, in say ten years time lasting 20-30 years. We seem to have been that way before with blood contamination, Equitable Insurance and the Post Office Horizon scandle.
Had Drax not taken their money, someone else would.
Government is your problem, not Drax.
@Gamecock: Which government is to blame? Well is it the one that brought in the Climate Change Act in 2008 (Labour – Milliband and the English Lit. Graduate who drafted it) or the Tory governments that followed with their continued enthusiasm for following the false narrative of AGW as epitomised in the NetZero nonsense? The Lib Dems would be just as culpable or worse, remember Ed Davey’s stance on AGW if you can. As regards politicians there were a few physicsts and chemists like Peter Lilley (Conservative) , Graham Stringer (Labour) and Roger Helmer (MEP/UKIP) who actually understood the scientific claims and the economic implications. The great majority of members of parliament have little or no real understanding of science or the scientific method. Your justification of those taking the money (Drax or anyone else) lacks any moral stance but in broken Brittain I suppose that that’s OK.
Sorry, pfg, but, in the end, it’s none of your list. It’s the people. It’s you. And everyone else who has accepted the absurd.
And why wouldn’t you accept it?
You are prosperous, and are not willing to risk your prosperity by directly fighting it. Yeah, some day it will all fall apart, but you hope the alligator will eat you last.
It’s why few escape the prosperity-decadence-collapse cycle.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke.
Prosperity silences the good. Protestors in the streets are unemployed losers. You need to fill the streets with good people. But you’ve got a meeting at 10.
@Gamecock. As regards myself you are completely wrong and have probably done zero research on my background. (You could start with my booklist of which there are various versions on the internet “Books that tell a different story”or perhaps with my interview for CLINTEL). People like me have been largely silenced for almost 20 years my challenges to the AGW mantra and the economic disasterous policies to which successive goverments have been committed. However this has not stopped myself and friends talking about these matters in the press, on the internet, in the Committee Rooms of the Houses of Parliament, at University meetings, at the Harvard Library, at the Institute Physics, the Energy Institute and the Royal Society. Thanks to Richard Black, Roger Harrabin and folks that have followed like Justin Rowlatt, people like myself never appear on the BBC or for that matter on ITV etc or anywhere else apart from GBNews.
Claire Coutinho has allocated £40bn (billion) for CCS at Drax on top of the yearly £600m for burning American trees. And that is on top of the £20bn that J Hunt slipped into last years budget for CCS. Is this the best spend in the current spending restrictions and all I hear is that the govt has got 5bn to give away inj tax cuts. They could have £65bn to give away bit the religion of net zero gets priority over the highest taxed citizens on the planet.
Cut down a tree. Burn it. CO2 is released.
I presume that to be ‘sustainable,’ they have to pay it back by growing a replacement tree. Except paying it forward is the only way to be ‘sustainable.’
Anywho, cutting trees on another continent is quite clever. Who in the British government is going to visit West by God Virginia to verify replacement trees were planted? Who is going to visit to monitor their continued growth?
Betcha Drax can show a forest pic from anywhere in the world to NAO and Ofgem and they’ll say, “Thanks. Fine. You’re good.”
I recall that in 2022 Drax received £617million in taxpayer subsidy and made £731million profit. It thus gets a subsidy of about £100 per tonne of wood. No wonder no lies are too big for Drax, the renewable energy industry and DESNZ.
Doesn’t anyone do the maths here? No subsidy and £100 million profit still sound pretty good to me!
Why are they allowed to include income that is from a taxpayer subsidy (which in theory are meant to be a short term measure) in their profits? This clearly distorts the sustainability of the business model for investors and looks as misleading as if a business borrowed money from a sister or parent company and claimed this was profit
If you look here
Click to access Chair-Report-Sixth-Carbon-Budget-roundtable-Greenhouse-gas-removals-policy-options.pdf
hidden among the policy gobbledegook is the fact the BECCS was seen as really the only alternative to direct air capture for large scale emissions removal: it is thus essential to net zero.
Removing it as an option would therefore create howls among the climastrologists that we should therefore be imposing harder and faster rationing on any kind of economic activity. This is they way they think: instead of admitting that their goal is unachievable, they double down and demand ever harsher action.
Paul this might be of interest
The BBC requires a “fearless” independent ombudsman to handle complaints because Ofcom is filled with former BBC staff, a former governor has said.
Baroness Deech, a crossbench peer, criticised the BBC’s current complaints procedure as “arcane and secretive”.
She was a BBC governor from 2002-06 and said an outsider is needed to oversee the system.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/23/bbc-needs-fearless-ombudsman-investigate-complaints/
Problems getting green hydrogen up and running by 2030
‘More important problems to solve’ | IEA head criticises German focus on green hydrogen
Fatih Birol warns that renewable H2 will remain expensive, with only 7% of projects set to be built by 2030
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/power/more-important-problems-to-solve-iea-head-criticises-german-focus-on-green-hydrogen/2-1-1587855
Have non of you noticed that they cannot do without Drax? Its input to the grid is vital.
Yes, let them burn coal and save the trees.
Yes; this point had been made when Drax came up a while back. 6 pc is 6 pc. Diversity of energy sources is also important. Who cares about the CO2, surely no one here; nor the reduction in the carbon cycling time that biomass burning represents (every tree dies and its accumulation of C is returned to the atmosphere by decomposers).
Bobn et al: I agree totally. Why not return the wood burning boilers at Drax to coal? As I last heard, two of the boilers still run on coal so all infra-structure is in place. Ms Coutinho has agreed to chuck £40 billion at Drax for a technology that doesn’t yet exist without demanding what all that dosh is going to be spent on. Above all, we can’t afford to shut down any more power generation.
“by burning 7m tonnes of wood a year”
That number must be for the dried pellets fed to the fire.
They don’t get that way without a lot of work and energy.
What would a pile of 7m tonnes look like?
How many tonnes would Kielder Forest or similar place
yield if harvested for pellets?
In the USA many homes burn pellets, much of them sold in
bags. Here is a video that shows the process.
Other videos can be seen on the right side as this plays.
When burning logs in a domestic log burner the wood is usually 3 years or more old when dried naturally. That can’t be the case for pellets can it?
20+ M tonnes of pellets would require special handling. So are they dried somehow in the manufacturing process ? What is the energy source? Or do they burn damp wood at Drax.
“…are they dried somehow…?”
It is all in the video. The energy comes from burning the “fines” or sawdust from the crushing. Because the wood destined to be pellets has been broken up, the ratio of the area-exposed-to-air to the volume of wet wood, is a million times greater than for a log lying on the ground; and the kiln-dry is very quick. The whole mechanised production, from woodland to wood-burner, adds up to being a very efficient process. But it is nothing more nor less than the processing of an agricultural crop. And if the crop takes fifty years to regrow…
Isn’t coal a biomass like trees, just 500 million years older?
NAO is correct in asking the difficult question, but note that Drax never include in any CO2 comments the whole story – the CO2 emissions incurred during tree felling, felled tree trimming, felled tree chipping, tree chips transportation to docks, transportation across the Atlantic and transportation from port to Drax, then we have the CO2 emissions incurred during “sustainable” re-planting – add these into the CO2 emissions from burning and “oh dear” we cannot make a case for massive taxpayer subsidies, and you can stick as many Carbon Capture units on this plant, they can never run at negative. If, and it is an important If, burning wood pellets was so good for the environment and so “productive”, subsidies would not be required – the very fact it was CO2 negative would be sufficient to get a small price bump, but the Company knows it is a serious pollution producer and is making as money as possible, large bonuses for management, big pensions etc, before someone actually realises that trees are a carbon sink, burning releases that carbon.
I do not subscribe to the Climate Change via Global Warning, but I understand that it is mad to burn trees.
Another question to ask in the context of the man made climate change hypothesis is since Co2 from tree burning is the same as Co2 from coal and the only difference in theory trees are allegedly replanted.
Wouldn’t there be less Co2 if we burn locally sourced coal in Drax which would also be more thermally efficient than wood burning and then planted trees to off set the Co2 emissions especially if you include as you said the effect of the CO2 emissions incurred during tree felling, felled tree trimming, felled tree chipping, [don’t forget the drying], tree chips transportation to docks, transportation across the Atlantic and transportation from port to Drax, then we have the CO2 emissions incurred during “sustainable” re-planting (good additional point as we need to consider any agricultural products used e.g. fertilizer produced from natural gas)
Excellent, Drax uses Lies, damn Lies and Obfuscation to extract the maximum in subsidies from this foolish CONsocialist Government, mind you, LooneyLabour, IlLiberal Democrats, GullibleGreens etc are no better.
I am appaled that the government intends throwing £40 billion just for carbon dioxide capture, and I notice utilisation has crept in there recently. That cost is less than that of Hinkley Point power station even with the added cost recently paid by the government. A nuclear power station against a yet to be proven gas capture scheme, it makes Hinkley point look like extremely good value?
apalled.
“…appaled…apalled.”
Or even “appalled.”
Let us look on the bright side regarding Hinckley Point C and Carbon Dioxide capture at Drax. Neither project is going to work. And so the waste of resources will be measured in tens of billions of pounds rather than hundreds of billions of pounds.
EDF said in 2007 that 2017’s Christmas turkeys would be roasted with electricity coming from Hinckley C.
More from the bright side:
https://www.ice.com/products/27996665/Dutch-TTF-Gas-Futures/data?marketId=5714606&span=3
How much ‘biomass’ in international shipping, aviation, construction, agriculture, motor transport etc? Why is NET ZERO always equated to electricity generation? Oh, by the way, what alarmists call ‘traditional biomass’. – local wood and dung – produces three times the global energy from windmills and solar panels.
Drax claims the scheme will allow it to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces – making it the world’s first carbon-negative thermal power station.
There’s a claim that’s a hostage to fortune if ever there was one. And if the claim turns out to be wrong, will those that made it lose anything because of it? Of course not.
So when there are no more trees? The coal furnace was a damned sight more environmentally friendly than transporting wood pellets from Canada to Drax, once more the nation is being ‘Green Conned’
The reasons Drax exists are firstly because it greatly increases the renewable energy generation figure and secondly because it provides dispatchable power.
Otherwise, as a hydrocarbon fuelled power station, it would be earmarked for demolition, probably explosively, as already demonstrated by our COP26 president seen here in this official SSE video of the demolition of Ferrybridge power station :
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1429456184902393858/pu/vid/720×720/JwPnpycxEiyBmqVJ.mp4?tag=12
There is the hope that Drax’s stay of execution may outlast this whole anti-West communist and feudal WEF CAGW/Net Zero scam. Happer & Wijngaarden have shown very clearly that doubling atmospheric CO2 produces a negligible increase in GHG effect because of IR saturation. See the CO2 Coalition website.
Burning coal is burning trees – just a few(!) years later than those grown in the USA.
I think I might give that one to my young grandson….just to annoy his teachers.
Private Eye has been going on about the nonsense of DRAX for ages
The Eye occasionally calls our some of the daft rewilding and non farming farmers. But the Eye wont call out all the Net Zero and Co2 AGW lies.
They did point out ages ago how the UK energy reserves are being depleted.
But they don’t seem able to figure out the great percentage of renewable energy the greater instability in the energy supply.
I expect if there are enough electric bike fires they may pick up that probably blaming cheap China imports. They have been going on about the freeports who will be able to police them selves leading to all sorts of doggy stuff going on.
Dave: thanks for the great “ice” web contact. I seem to miss these and there are lots of good sites out there. Looking at the gas prices, isn’t it a pity that Rough and Aldborough storage are not working properly? Then looking at world Crude-oil prices which have been in the $80 / bbl area for weeks, where are the, obviously massive, profits going; certainly not to the motorist or central heating user!
“…massive profits…”
Very roughly, the total world-wide revenues of the oil and gas industry are $5 trillion dollars. The net income of the ten largest companies (not including Russia) is running at $0.25 trillion dollars. That is one dollar in twenty. Or, if you like to look at just oil, out of the $80 for a barrel, $4 will go to the shareholders (who will pay further tax on it if they are permitted to receive a dividend by the executives of the company).
In the most general sense, Consumers receive the greatest part of the “value*” from fossil fuels followed by State “actors” of one sort or another.
* Through what is called, technically, Consumers’ Surplus. The theory of this is quite simple. Consider you are buying bread for the week and you are thinking rationally about the marginal analysis. You may be prepared to pay $10 for a supply of one loaf, but only $8 for the second and $4 for the third and $1.20 for the fourth and $0.50 for the fifth. If the actual price is $1 you buy exactly four and expend $4. Your surplus – a sort of hedonic personal profit – is measured by
$10 + $8 + $4 + $1.20 – $4 = $19.20.
“…revenues…”
I mean annual revenues.
Additionally, it has to be remembered that the industry had LOSSES during the Covid-19 panic. At one point, oil fell to $20 a barrel.
Carbon capture and storage is also a box ticking exercise by Govt. The energy consumption of carbon capture, compression and pumping is bad enough but the elephant in the room is the impossibility of proving the carbon dioxide stays sequestered and doesn’t just seep back out.
But as long as the carbon dioxide is pumped into the underground chamber the box is ticked and everyone congratulates themselves on saving the planet.