Why Britain’s biggest carbon emitter gets billions in green grants | Drax

The cooling towers of the massive Drax power station tower over rural North Yorkshire, both as a reminder of Britain's dark past and a sign of the country's commitment to a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

The power station was once one of the largest coal-burning plants in Europe, and a lightning rod for campaigners opposing fossil fuels in Britain’s electricity system. Today, its owners claim it is the largest renewable energy plant in Britain, burning 7 million tonnes of biomass pellets a year to produce enough electricity to meet around 4% of Britain’s electricity needs.

But the power station’s green revolution is not without its sceptics. Green groups and climate scientists argue that Drax remains the UK’s biggest single carbon emitter and that the FTSE 250 owner should not have been able to claim billions of pounds in renewable energy grants and more than £7 billion in bill payer support since it began switching to biomass in 2012.

The conflict between the two camps flared up again as the government prepared to decide whether to extend a subsidy scheme that pays Drax about $500 million a year until the end of the decade, when it expires in 2027.

The uncertainty has prompted calls for ministers to examine the evidence presented on both sides of the debate. Here, we take a closer look at the arguments, counter-arguments and science behind the UK’s multi-billion pound biomass investment.

What is biomass?

Power plants can burn compressed wood pellets instead of coal or gas to generate electricity. Drax burned about 6 million tonnes of wood pellets at its North Yorkshire plant last year, which required about 12 million tonnes of raw wood, which is significantly more than the UK's total annual wood harvest of about 11 million tonnes.

Chart showing the top 10 emitters

As a result, about 80 percent of the wood pellets Drax uses come from forests in the United States and Canada, with the remainder coming from parts of Europe, including Estonia and Latvia. Drax says these forests are managed sustainably, and the pellets are mostly made up of sawdust and scrap, which are byproducts of making high-value wood products like lumber and furniture. Still, more than a fifth of the pellets Drax uses come from virgin trees, but Drax claims this is low-grade wood that would otherwise be rejected by sawmills and thrown away as waste.

What are this company's green certifications?

Drax claims that biomass power is carbon neutral because the emissions from the chimney are offset by the emissions absorbed by the trees grown to produce the pellets. This is supported by the carbon accounting methodology used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which expects that emissions from biomass should be accounted for by the forestry sector rather than the energy industry to avoid double-counting carbon dioxide.

Drax plans to extend its green claim by installing carbon capture technology on its power stations from 2030, making it the world’s first power station to create negative emissions. It expects to receive government subsidies for this work, paid for through energy tariffs, and has lobbied for interim support to keep the business going when the current subsidy scheme ends in 2027 and a new subsidy stream is created.

The proposals are at odds with climate advisers on the government’s Climate Change Committee, who have warned that large-scale biomass should not receive additional subsidies unless it is used in conjunction with a carbon capture technology known as BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage).

Is it really carbon neutral?

Simply put: no. The carbon accounting used to justify this claim is widely debated in scientific research being conducted in European academic circles. They worry that the time lag between when emissions leave power plant smokestacks and when new trees can absorb carbon creates a carbon debt that could accelerate the climate crisis in the short term.

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The European Academy's Scientific Advisory Committee said in a recent study that it could take 30 to 50 years for biomass to reduce carbon emissions compared to burning fossil fuels.

More than 500 scientists have written a letter to leaders in the U.S. and the EU warning them not to rely on biomass to meet climate goals in 2021. The open letter reads: Regrowing trees and replacing fossil fuels will eventually pay off this carbon debt, but it will take time for them to grow back. The world has no time to solve climate change.

There are also doubts about whether the biomass industry is meeting its own standards. The UK’s National Audit Office found this summer that the government could not demonstrate that current sustainability rules were sufficient to provide assurance about the green credentials of biomass. More recently, the energy regulator admitted that Drax had weak procedures, controls and governance that led to inaccurate reporting of data on the type of forestry and sawnwood content used at its power stations. The company agreed to pay a £25m fine for the breaches.

Is it necessary for carbon neutrality?

Once again, there are conflicting views from leading authorities. Drax points out that most projections modelling the UK’s net-zero pathway, including the Climate Change Committee’s, show BECCS as the main source of clean energy. This is true, but it’s not surprising given the role biomass plays in the government’s energy policy. But can the UK achieve its legally binding targets without relying on biomass? In the government’s biomass strategy paper published last year, Professor Paul Monks, the Department for Energy’s chief scientific adviser, said that negative emissions technologies would be needed to compensate for areas where full decarbonisation was not possible. In other words, if we can’t rely on power stations to provide the negative emissions that Drax claims, the UK’s legally binding target of becoming a net-zero economy by 2050 could be in jeopardy.

But according to the Climate Change Panel, it’s not impossible. According to a recent paper on biomass published in 2018, recent research suggests that a pathway with a greater than 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is achievable without deploying BECCS on a large scale to provide negative emissions. The catch? This requires ambitious steps to reduce energy demand in the short term, and fast.

These measures include significant improvements in energy efficiency, changes in diet, rapid electrification and low population growth. If many of these measures could be combined together, it would be possible to avoid using large amounts of bioenergy without CCS, he said.

Without a step change in approach to tackling the climate crisis, the UK must include biomass in its plans to reach its net zero target. But could achieving net zero on paper turn out to be a hollow climate victory?

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/09/why-the-uks-biggest-carbon-emitter-receives-billions-in-green-subsidies The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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