Drax To Build Wood Power Cargo Ship
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
British power company Drax has drawn up plans for the world’s first wood-powered cargo ship, claiming that the controversial power source can help to cut greenhouse gas emissions from sea freight.
Drax, which operates a tree-burning power station in the UK, has signed a deal with three Japanese shipping companies to develop a “bioship” fuelled by wood chips instead of marine diesel. It hopes to see the first wood-fuelled cargo ship set sail by 2029.
The vessel would itself be used to ferry woodchips harvested by Drax from North American forests to new markets in Japan.
Drax and its Japanese partners said such ships would open the way to zero-emission shipping for many other cargoes.
However, the plan will infuriate many environmental groups who argue that cutting down forests for fuel is the wrong way to reach net zero.
Drax is best-known in the UK for its giant power station in Yorkshire, which last year generated around 6pc of the country’s electricity by burning 6.4m tonnes of wood – equivalent to 27 million trees – mostly imported from North America.
For comparison, the New Forest in Hampshire has around 46 million trees.
Drax and its supporters argue that wood is a sustainable energy source as trees can be grown to replace those cut down for fuel and the plants capture carbon while they are developing.
However, critics point out that trees grow much more slowly than the time it takes to use them for fuel, raising questions as to how sustainable they really are.
The UK Government supports the use of wood as a fuel and has given Drax subsidies for producing green energy, which amounted to £617m in 2022 and £587m in 2023.
In February, Drax chief executive Will Gardiner said he wanted to build more wood pellet plants in the US, doubling production to 8m tonnes by 2030.
Green campaigners said the plan was designed to exploit loopholes in carbon accounting rather than to save the planet.
Merry Dickinson of Axe Drax, which campaigns against the company’s plans to expand wood burning, said: “Burning wood pellets emits as much carbon as coal. This latest move is nothing more than another greenwashed scam from Drax.”
Sally Clark from Biofuelwatch said: “Using wood pellets to power ships will only lead to more climate-wrecking emissions, harm to wildlife and pollution of communities. If we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown, we need to protect and restore the world’s forests, not allow big polluters like Drax to send our futures up in smoke.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/14/drax-power-ships-controversial-biomass-fuel-trees/
Drax is already burning the equivalent of half the New Forest every year. Heaven knows how many more forests will be cut down to satisfy Will Gardiner’s lust for more wood pellets.
And as we already know, burning trees adds far more CO2 into the atmosphere than any other fossil fuel, in terms of the energy produced. The theory that trees will eventually grow back to replace them is highly dubious, as many come from virgin forests which may never regrow. Even if they do, it will take decades to offset the CO2 emitted from burning, by which time billions of other trees will also have been burnt.
Burning wood was of course man’s main source of energy for millennia; now we seem to be intent to regress to those days.
As for Drax, they are in a bit of a hole, being totally reliant on government subsidies. If these are stopped, they don’t have a viable business; hence their desperation to expand operations, regardless of the environmental destruction they will wrought.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Like EV’s a good idea on paper and it will attract subsidies. What’s not to like?
Drax is just part of the whole fraud to destroy Western / Capitalist economies .
If this link has not been hidden away , it shows that Drax gets £1.5 Million PER DAY in subsidies .https://news.sky.com/story/power-giant-drax-told-by-own-advisers-to-stop-calling-biomass-carbon-neutral-12866031
So just another way of taking more money from the people to bring about the world Socialist / Marxist government .
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
Should we be getting worried , Jim Dale wants Climate Change deniers Jailed
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1899072/man-made-climate-denier-criminals
The logic for Drax was that it would only burn wood that was waste and therefore needed disposing of in some way or another. We now know that such wood is incapable of supporting a behemoth like Drax.
The argument that wood is renewable so OK to burn is ridiculous. It would only be relevant if the forests chopped down to feed it were instantaneously replaced, on the same sites, with trees of the same age.
Y E S !!! and I’m shouting … getting triggered ! Triggered, I say ! I keep mentioning / repeating that all this is a Generational thing. Now, this morning on some Euro election German waffle, I saw that at least SOME Germans must be listening too… the FDP (unfortunately) – they are adopting that phrase for change Generation for the better, or something like that – Forgotten now but it was in English. I thought we did Brexit ?
SO how will The ship manage ? Use up half its load to bring the rest here, but then how does it return? Not many Treestumps or forest Hag lying by the waveside, is there?
The ship would need to bunker [take on fuel] enough for the round trip [Japan and back] – plus a contingency reserve. That would likely be five [or more] days consumption at full speed. Wood waste is not especially energy-dense, so the ship would need to have [comparatively] greater bunker spaces. A design problem, and probably not a great one. As a seaman, I would expect to see some reasonable contingency planning; that might include modest availability of ‘fuel’ [=wood] at the discharge port – or close to the course in transit, or perhaps carrying an extra reserve of fuel that is not wood [marine bunker oil, or diesel, perhaps powdered coal, or just-conceivably LNG]. Costs, safety and convenience need to be evaluated first.
Certification of the ship’s engineers may also need to be examined ahead of time – my guess is that this will be a steam ship – burn the wood, heat water to steam, use that to drive a turbine [or two] – and steam tickets were vanishing when I was looking after fleets in the first part of this century. Even combined tickets – for Steam and Motor – were becoming rather unusual. Motor ships were more economic with bunkers [a bit] and ship owners and charterers didn’t like spending money. I guess they still don’t!
Obvious precautions would need to be taken – keep the wood chip pellet fuel dry – some wood expands when wet; enable a ‘black start’ in case of blackouts.
I have visions of the steamship in Around the World in Eighty Days – running out of fuel so having to burn every piece of wood available, until it reached Liverpool looking like a mast-less hulk.
Perhaps they could be dual fuel like the Scottish ferries, the ones where the “green” fuel has to be imported from Qatar… if they ever happen at all.
Aye, ” Wood waste is not especially energy-dense” we call it Sa Dist. Dats fit sits atween e eeerz o’ ‘e Politishuns an’ menee o’ e Nieuws paper / telly fowk
Does anyone believe all Drax wood pellets come from dead or otherwise useless trees?
There have been at least two TV documentaries on this. One that I saw followed trucks carrying whole trunks directly to the chipping plant.
Also it is doubtful that there ever was much “waste” available since the forestry industry is highly efficient, using such material for chipboard and the like and burning anything left for energy/process heat.
The biomass market has allowed foresters to send brash and thinnings for chipping and burning where before it was burnt on site. If the forest is part of an estate with buildings then the chippings would be used on the estate. The Goodwood Estate grows sweet chestnut for use in the estate buildings.
Well as Gramps says that many moons ago before the climate changed, the Forestry Commission boffins didn’t want you to mulch down or collect & remove the Hag/ Brash/ Branches …. Had to be left for the Birds n Bees. Was that the beginning of Modern Wokeism or work from Home…. ie not do too much. ? Occasionally you’ll see Piles of Branches Left for burning or then forgotten about. Likely an untidy Garden / backyard …. Conducive to a Happy Country ?
O/T on similar vein look at the Sides of the roads and much of the urban countryside. just a MESS – why Tidy it? -Avoch, munn, they’ll soon be developing it: save the ££££s and a Big Bulldozer will come and take it away, they seem to think. So they wonder why folk are fed up, suicidal etc. We live in a “Don’t Do That society ( remember DDT ? )
No.
Live trees, not dead or diseased
and why wouldn’t they suggest it when too many countries tell them and their populous that cutting down and burning trees is green energy. Until the globe changes its stance on this nothing will change.
Isn’t this a major change to the business model of Drax? From energy producer to shipping company.
And if they are doing a deal with Japanese shipping companies to move wood chip from north America to Drax’s Japanese partners why do those Japanese partners need Drax anyway? Couldn’t those Japanese partners deal directly with the Japanese shipping companies. I must be missing something.
I think you find that their main business is mining……….
………..subsidy mining
Oh? Since when did Mining morph into Farming ? Just like in Germany, Bauer = Builder or Farmer, Tiefbau is mining, Hochbau is building UPWARDS, the roots of our languages
Don’t forget their other wizzard scheme, Carbon Capture and Storage!
They already pissed a Billion up against the wall without any results, about a decade ago. That’s a Billion of YOUR money, readers; kindly provided by the blue cheek of the Uniparty arse. They have promised further Billions for another attempt to crack the same nut, although there is absolutely no doubt that the forthcoming red cheek of the same arse will be even more generous!
Meanwhile, the malodourous brown stuff squirting out from between both cheeks will continue unabated.
All well worth it as we need their “expertise” to be spooned out to the Statutory Committee on Climate Change, for them to lick up.
Conflict of Interest? Don’t be silly!
Drax will do anything to get subsidies. It cares only about making a profit and to hell with the environment. Drax sits atop a massive coalfield and if we’d had a sensible government this millenia, it would still be coal-fired. At a minimum it should be converted back to burning imported coal or gas before the lights go out.
I read somewhere that back when Ed Davy was energy secretary he said that we needed to build 20 new gas fired power stations by 2030 but wasn’t he the one who had Drax converted to wood? Why didn’t he have Drax converted to gas at the time. Wouldn’t that have been better.
Probably the Law of Unintended Consequence.
Drax, I assume, thought that the profits [i.e. subsidies paid by us poor taxpayers] were better with wood chips.
Presumably one or other of the succession of Energy Secretaries we’ve had since the ‘Glory Days of Ed Milliband’ must have encouraged that sort of behaviour; I wonder if any of them could tell the difference between energy and power. My shilling would be on a modest minority.
The present Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – Clare Coutinho, did at least do Maths [with Philosophy] at university, so may have been exposed to some science.
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Whilst maths is necessary to study physics no physics is necessary to study maths (and philosophy). And how much was maths and how much philosophy?
Phillip, can you imagine the droves of XR nutters descending on Drax to riot if Drax was converted back to coal?
Mind you, I’d like it to happen so that society (that’s the rest of us) can finally reclaim this country’s sanity from the extremists who, far from saving us, are (I think, purposely) trying to wreck this country (not to mention those who are trying to sell it out for personal profit).
“Heaven knows how many more forests will be cut down to satisfy Will Gardiner’s lust for more wood pellets.”
That’s unlike you to make a factual error, Paul! 😀
Correction: Heaven knows how many more forests will be cut down to satisfy Will Gardiner’s lust for more subsidies.
https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=Japan%20Biomass%20Annual%202023_Tokyo_Japan_JA2023-0071.pdf
Their whole focus is on getting their noses further into the obscene subsidies trough, nothing more nothing less.
So many worthless jobs and projects are supported by the cancerous growth on the back of Western Civilization which is the klymutt industry. Cut off the subsidies and 99% of the noise will disappear because it was always and is still just all about the money which our politicians throw around with a next to no checks and balances which to me borders on criminality.
I christen this ship ‘IDIOTS ARK’?
First thought was it’s April 1st, but apparently it is true. Do they get a subsidy for the wood pellets burnt on the ship? Drax should be in the plan to be shut down, but the 3GW they generate is essential to keeping the lights on now that all the coal power stations are closing. (to be demolished rather than mothballed for emergency use). My attitude now is just to let them get on with destroying reliable dispatchable power generation and wait for the blackouts. Technical arguments against relying on wind and solar, fall on deaf ears in the quest for Net Zero. Lets hope for a severe winter, it is the only when we freeze that the people will realise the futility of abandoning fossil fuels.
It’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.
W. C. Fields
Drax isn’t the bad guy. Government subsidies is the problem. Drax is just taking advantage of bad government.
Wasn’t the history government told them they had to close, and they asked, “How about if we switch from coal to wood chips?”
And, they are producing much needed electricity for Britain, so don’t be too harsh on them. They are keeping you alive.
To get UK to Net Zero
Frack.
Use methane to replace all oil use, including road, rail and shipping. This will lower our CO2 footprint.
Use the ensuing prosperity to build a fleet of SMRs, using their output to lower CO2 output.
In 2055 turn off fossil fuel use.
To maximise UK carbon emissions:
Try to use renewables to keep the lights on, waste time, energy and money struggling with intermittency and power cuts with damage to prosperity. In 2025 admit failure and go for first option, thus getting to Net Zero decades later.
Or do better science and discover thar Net Zero is not needed.
JF
That’s OK as long as the fracking happens under your house and not mine !
A fracking drillhead could be set up a mile or more from your house yet, with horizontal drilling it could end up fracking under yours. Yet I’d bet you’d never know it. Would you prefer a field of wind turbines?
We live in a country where the “economy” consists of a house price ponzi. When they frack Oxfordshire (which they could) first, then I might agree to it in Lancashire.
It’s not just the fracking itself. There was going to be a constant stream of heavy tankers to take the waste water down the country lanes to the motorway, down the already busy M6, and through an already severely congested motorway junction (M61/M60) to a treatment plant at Salford.
Anyhow is it not the case that they gave up because they couldn’t maintain a commercially-viable gas flow rate ? I believe they discovered that the gas is not readily extractable, and so it’s no panacea to our problems.
Happened without anyone noticing under Poole Harbour. Wytch farm has about 170 wells of which around 20% are fracked..
Doesn’t seem to have impacted house prices at Sandbanks.
Thanks, I’ve been detached from my phone and was unable to respond. The reply merely re-emphasised the blind ignorance of the anti-fracking lobby. Anyone would think they want us to starve in the dark – if they are funded from Putin’s deep pockets then that, of course, is a given.
JF
They can frack under my houses to their heart’s content!
Especially if they sell me some of the gas at a HUGE discount!
JF
There were some proposed sweeteners, like giving the local council a bit of money. But the gas itself would be sold at the market price.
I bet you, like me, would be sceptical that we would see any personal benefit from giving the council more money. Even if we did, it wouldn’t be long before central government reduced the council funding to compensate.
Don’t you get it, KZ? Fracked gas used to generate electricity would make bills much cheaper than that reliant on intermittent wind and solar with expensive ff backup. When you pull into a filling station in your car do you look for cheap fuel or the most expensive?
The gas would be sold at the market price, and there isn’t enough of it to affect the world price. If they can get a better price for it in (say) Belgium that is where they will sell it. So there wouldn’t be any cheap gas with which to generate electricity.
Where we might gain is, the tax on it could slow the government debt pilling up as quickly as it is.
“The gas would be sold at the market price”
Oh dear, not that discredited old chestnut again!
US fracked gas is sold on the domestic market at a much lower price than the international one, it is negotiated when the licenses are written.
That’s true in the US, but it wouldn’t be here in the UK. We have a gas pipeline going to Europe, the US does not.
Same with the electricity it would produce. The industry is very busy building interconnectors between countries so they can always access the best price. It’s not “our” gas or “our” electricity. It is there for global corporations to exploit us with.
It is a total disgrace that our government and the net zero lobby are prepared to argue that it is acceptable to pour hundreds of millions of pounds into this appalling scheme which is doing and will continue to do catastrophic damage to huge areas of the World’s forests.
Subsidies should be withdrawn immediately so that Drax will go bust and the ghastly money grabbing people who are implementing these schemes brought to book for the incredible damage they have caused.
It is almost as if the discovery that coal was more energy dense than wood or charcoal never happened.
And something I suspect will grab Paul’s attention is the claim from grant troughers at Cambridge ‘University’ that last summer was the hottest in 2000 years. I know what you are thinking – did they unearth a long lost dataset of temperature readings begun by the Romans? No. It is treemometry raising its inaccurate head again. If you go back to climate crook Mann’s Hookey Stick, you might recall Mike’s Nature Trick which is where at the end he used instrumental data and not tree rings……because the tree ring derived temperature was declining and hence ‘Hide the Decline’ became a phrase. Even Keith Briffa had the conscience to suggest that tree rings were not an accurate proxy for temperature. There is one other elephant in the room – with the claim that we haven’t seen such scorching temperatures since Christ was born and the Romans were around comes the question ‘why was it so hot then?’. This could be followed by ‘how come we can’t grow grapes in Newcastle like the Romans did?’ and since there is no acknowledgement of the Medieval Warm Period ‘how come we can’t farm on Greenland like the Vikings did?.
did they unearth a long lost dataset of temperature readings begun by the Romans
The UK met office data is currently only accurate to plus/minus 5 degrees C, what are the accuracy tolerances of the data created by Cambridge University stretching back 2000 years?
“what are the accuracy tolerances of the data created by Cambridge University stretching back 2000 years?”
In truth, no better than plus/minus 5 degrees. At best.
Treemometers are affected by things other than temperatures, as I expect most reading here know – water availability, seasonal variation, nearby trees, predation/infestation. Doubtless others can add to that little list.
Which all makes the Cambridge ‘data’ not much more than monkeys playing darts. Some of them drunk.
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If wood is less “energy dense” than coal or oil, what volume will the bunkers be on a wood-burning ship?
SO Who is Drax ? presumably not a single person …. but working for our Pensions ? ( or not )
It’s the name of a small village in Yorkshire, but one wonders whether the villain in Moonraker is more appropriate.
Drax wants wood pellets as a means of ship propulsion…
US Coast Guard Issues Safety Alert for Wood Pellet Fires
According to the International Maritime Solid Bulk Cargoes Code, wood pellets containing additives or binders can ferment over time if their moisture content exceeds 15%, leading to the generation of flammable and asphyxiating gases that can cause spontaneous combustion.
https://gcaptain.com/us-coast-guard-issues-safety-alert-for-wood-pellet-fires/
Research RESEARCH RESEARCH R E S E A R C H …. I thought the UK was good at it ? ( sarc). 97% , Peers, blah blah blah.
Silly suggestion time………..
Rather than burn wood pellets created by chopping down semi mature forests, let’s leave them in the ground to grow, even going so far as too plant more trees that will slowly grow each year, sucking in the life giving CO2 plant food, growing to magnificent specimens of each type, giving pleasure to millions, and then when they do die back from natural causes, harvest the timber for clippings, construction timber, furniture- and now we come to the cliffhanger- what do we burn……….
Millions of years ago, forests became part of a process whereby time, pressure converted the timber into……….COAL, and it is abundant and although finite, the UK has over 250yrs of reserves that can be switched on tomorrow, giving the already denuded forests of North America a chance to grow and mature, meanwhile, as well as abundant Coal, we have frackable Natural Gas and Oil, we have offshore untapped reserves of Oil & Gas, so let’s couple existing proven efficient Energy sources together with emerging technologies and drive the price of Energy down to below 2018 levels (high but manageable), attract investment in industrial development, which will bring high quality REAL employment to all parts of the Nations, reduce the onerous tax burden and let the UK live the lives it deserves.
And then he woke up
” the first wood-fuelled cargo ship set sail by 2029“
Then retired in 2030 and sunk for a reef in 2031.
What a great plan. 🙂
Where to begin? Not content with chopping down great swathes of American forests which are busy sequestering CO2 like mad and releasing all their CO2 into the atmosphere, they now plan to compound the felony by releasing even more of the stuff by replacing relatively efficient and cost-effective oil with inefficient woodchips.
Insanity rules!
Energy content of woodchips is so low that ship could burn its entire load before reaching England.
...woodchips is so low...
Selected at random:
https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/biomass-energy-resources/reference-biomass/facts-figures/typical-calorific-values-of-fuels/
Woodchips 870 kWh/m^3
Anthracite 10,100 kWh/m^3
GC/Micky – the energy content of Marine Diesel Oil (MDO) is 36 MJ/l apparently. I reckon that is 36*1000/0.277=133,333 kWh/m^3. That sounds so huge I’m doubting my maths – would a bunker solidly filled with a block of wood with no spaces need to be over 150 times the size of the oil tank?
Pity the bloke who has to saw it up to feed it into the boiler!
Thanks for looking it up, Mr Brown. I had planned to on returning from the gym.
I did find an apparently authoritative reference that says 38.3 MJ/l. Close to your source.
This ‘merican is reluctant to try metric conversions. A web conversion program says 38.3 MJ = 10.6388 kWh
Times a thousand = 10,638.8 kWh
A similar number to Micky’s anthracite number.
So Drax boaty will need 12X the volume of fuel storage, ceteris paribus. Or, actually, their cargo is their fuel. As long as it lasts.
They better not run out on the high seas; no one delivers bulk woodchips at sea.
Thank you for checking, GC. I suspect a wandering decimal in there somewhere.
The link given by Micky R says 3,100 kWh/m^3 for wood PELLETS (i.e. not chips). I believe the wood chips are compressed into pellets.
Wikipedia is in broad agreement with the Gamecock diesel figure (10,639 kWh/m^3), so let’s take that as correct.
The volume of wood pellets is then about 3.4 times that of the equivalent diesel.
This is with wood pellets not wood chips of course.
Selected at random:
https://www.vesma.com/conversions.htm
Class G heavy fuel oil (which is probably similar to bunker oil) =11.7 kWh per litre, = 11,700 kWh/m^3.
For even a vaguely useful speed, the burn rate by volume for wood chips to power a big cargo ship would surely be ferocious.
utter madness. And given Drax subsidies, I’m paying for this nonsense.
Drax can avoid windfall tax by burning money in a vanity project.
I’m wondering if it’ll be a paddle steamer and take as long as a SNP ferry?
Might be an interesting design challenge how to mechanize mass feeding of chips into the ship’s boilers, assuming it’s not men with no shirts and big shovels, though Drax has surely already done it for their power plants.
Shovelling woodchips into the boilers will be the punishment for those found guilty of climate denial.