Being the Green Party we are, of course, interested in sustainability, renewables, and the climate crisis. So, being the Selby Green Party, you might think we would be very supportive of Drax with its claims to be world-leading in the biomass industry and key to making our region the first carbon-negative region in the UK. But.
But, but, but….
Looking at the very long trains full of wood pellets heading to the power station, one every two hours, we just thought ‘that’s an awful lot of trees in those trains’. So we started doing our own research, reading the scientists’ views on burning trees for the industrial-scale generation of electricity. And the scientists do not think it’s a good idea. But it would seem that Drax understands the words ‘renewable’, ‘sustainable’, ‘waste’ and even ‘carbon dioxide’, differently from the rest of us.
They claim that trees are renewable because they can plant more trees. True. But a new tree planted today takes at least 40 years to replace the tree being cut down. `Added to that, the existing trees are being cut down when they are at peak value financially, but it is ancient trees that are most effective at carbon sequestration so they are preventing trees from ever doing their best work from the planet’s point of view.
But crucially, we haven’t got 40 years in which to rebalance the carbon situation, so every tree cut down and replaced by a sapling is only doing harm to the atmosphere in the time that we have got left. But that’s not all, add to that the effects on biodiversity and soil retention as well as carbon storage, of cutting ancient woodland down and replacing it with tree monocultures – as is often the practice, masquerading as reforestation - and it really doesn’t sound sustainable.
But there are many more problems with biomass for the energy industry – such as their definition of whole trees as ‘waste’ while leaving behind the slash they claim to be using. But that wasn’t the only problem highlighted in the recent BBC Panorama documentary, which has rightly rung alarm bells that have affected Drax’s shares, and meant that Drax is being called in for questioning by the Yorkshire & Humber Climate Commission, the Environmental Audit Committee (in which Caroline Lucas had Dr Knight of Drax visibly struggling to respond to her questions) and BEIS – in which Will Gardner plumbed new depths by claiming Drax’s CO2 is different from other CO2!
For all this damage and destruction, we are all paying Drax c.£2million per day in renewables subsidies – but these millions should be going to actually renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, hydro, tidal etc, not to the biggest CO2 emitter in the UK, which emits more CO2 per unit of energy produced than burning fossil fuels. But Drax has a very impressive greenwash machine, which keeps quiet about all that while trumpeting the peanuts they ‘donate’ back to us in the form of a few laptops for local schools or meals for care homes. And then there is BECCS, Drax’s current proposal to install a carbon capture unit at the power station, which will also require a pipeline to carry the captured CO2 from the power station out to the North Sea. There are so many new problems inherent in that (including that there is no evidence that this will ever work and that it will make the power station even less efficient than it is now, never mind the dangers inherent in the pipeline) – but that will have to wait for another post in the near future.
