Wood-fired plant that takes billions in green handouts is hacking down Canadian forest, TV probe alleges
- Drax generates 12 per cent of UK’s renewable electricity by burning wood pellets
- It bought logging licences to cut down two areas of forest in western Canada
- The company claims it only used leftover sawdust and waste wood from forests
- But the BBC film shows logs from the forest being loaded on to a Drax truck
Britain’s largest renewable power station is cutting down carbon-rich forests while receiving billions in green- energy subsidies from UK taxpayers, an investigation claims.
Panorama tonight {3.10.22} reports how Drax, which generates 12 per cent of the UK’s renewable electricity by burning wood pellets at its Yorkshire power station, bought logging licences to cut down two areas of forest in western Canada.
The company claims it only used leftover sawdust and waste wood from the forests but the BBC film, titled The Green Energy Scandal Exposed, shows logs from the forest being loaded on to a Drax truck and then unloaded at one of its pellet plants.
The programme says that Drax’s power station burned more than seven million tonnes of imported wood pellets last year and that documents on a Canadian forestry database show that only 11 per cent of logs delivered to two of its pellet plants are the small, twisted or rotten timber the company says it uses.
Drax has already received £6billion in green energy subsidies even though burning wood gives off more greenhouse gases than burning coal, Panorama emphasised.
The two areas of environmentally important forest – in the Canadian province of British Columbia – where Drax bought logging licences have never been logged before.
One of the sites includes large areas that have been identified as rare, old-growth forest. Drax’s own responsible sourcing policy says it ‘will avoid damage or disturbance’ to primary and old-growth forest. However, satellite pictures show Drax is now cutting down this forest, according to the BBC.
The company told Panorama that logging at this site would reduce the risk of wildfires.
The second Drax logging licence is for a mature primary forest that has now been cut down. Drax told the BBC it hadn’t cut down the forest itself but transferred the logging licences to other companies.
However, the authorities in British Columbia confirmed to Panorama that Drax still holds the licences.
Drax later admitted to Panorama that it did use logs from the forest to make wood pellets, claiming they were species the timber industry didn’t want.
The company also said the sites identified by Panorama weren’t primary forest because they were near roads, yet the BBC pointed out that there is no mention of proximity to roads in the United Nations’ definition of primary forest. A Drax spokesman told the BBC that 80 per cent of material in its Canadian pellets is sawmill residuals, which would be disposed of anyway.
Last week it emerged that Drax had quietly agreed to pay out millions of dollars to settle air-pollution claims against its wood-pellet factories in the United States, according to an investigation by Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative unit.
A Drax spokesman said: ‘Drax does not harvest forests and has not taken any material directly from the two areas the BBC has looked at.’
Burning imported wood in Drax power plant ‘doesn’t make sense’, says Kwasi Kwarteng. Drax has taken £5.6bn in subsidies from energy bill payers but business secretary says practice is ‘not sustainable’
The importing of wood to burn in Drax power station “is not sustainable” and “doesn’t make any sense”, the business and energy secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, told a private meeting of MPs during August 2022.
The remarks are significant as the burning of biomass to produce energy is an important part of the UK government’s net zero strategy and has received £5.6bn in subsidies from energy bill payers over the last decade. Scientists and campaigners have long argued that burning wood to produce electricity is far from green and can even increase the CO2 emissions driving the climate crisis.
Kwarteng said the government’s advisers, the Climate Change Committee, had said biomass was a necessary part of climate action in the UK.
But Kwarteng added: “I can well see a point where we just draw the line and say: This isn’t working, this doesn’t help carbon emission reduction, that’s it – we should end it. All I’m saying is that we haven’t quite reached that point yet.” Drax’s share price fell 10% in early trading on Wednesday, wiping about £280m off the value of the company.
About 80% of the wood pellets burned by Drax come from North America. Kwarteng said: “There’s no point getting it from Louisiana – that isn’t sustainable … transporting these wood pellets halfway across the world – that doesn’t make any sense to me at all.” Since 2019, when Kwarteng became an energy minister, Drax has received £2.5bn in subsidies for its power station, which previously burned coal.
The subsidies are due to end in 2027, but Drax is hoping to gain new subsidies by adding carbon capture technology to its plant. This would mean the CO2 taken from the atmosphere when the trees grew would end up buried underground, potentially reducing CO2 levels. This process accounts for about three-quarters of the “negative emissions” that the government’s net zero strategy says the UK must capture.
The European Academies Science Advisory Council said last year that burning wood in power stations was “not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change”. Environmental campaigners also say harvesting the wood damages forests.
One MP at the meeting told Kwarteng: “It can take 100 years to grow a tree but 100 seconds to combust it. So, unless we actually have a measure of how much CO2 is being released in the same period of time as is being sequestered by new growth, it seems to me ludicrous to say that this is carbon neutral.” Another MP said: “It’s cutting down huge numbers of forests and it’s not defensible.”
A government official also told the MPs that moving to UK-sourced biomass would not necessarily guarantee sustainability. They said: “Just because they’re sourced domestically doesn’t mean they will be less carbon intensive.”
A government spokesperson said: “[Kwarteng] has always been clear biomass has a key role to play in boosting Britain’s energy security, having supplied enough reliable renewable electricity to keep the lights on for 4 million households. The more homegrown power like biomass we generate at home, the less exposed we’ll be to volatile gas prices pushing up bills.
“The UK government only supports biomass which complies with our strict sustainability criteria and will shortly publish our biomass strategy, which will further detail our position on its future use,” the spokesperson said.
The government launched a consultation on Wednesday on potential business models to pay for a first biomass burning plant fitted with carbon capture. In contrast to his comments to MPs, Kwarteng said on launching the consultation: “The government is fully behind biomass energy to provide more power in Britain.”
Drax did not respond to a request for comment on Kwarteng’s remarks to MPs. On the consultation, the chief executive of Drax, Will Gardiner, said: “The government is paving the way for the UK to lead the world in deploying vital carbon removal technologies like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. [This technology] is vital to energy security and net zero because it can produce reliable renewable power whilst also permanently removing CO2 from the atmosphere – no other technology does both.”
A letter to the government signed by more than a dozen green groups including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth warns ministers against relying too heavily on plans to capture carbon emissions to help tackle the climate crisis.
The letter warned that burning more imported wood pellets could accelerate the climate crisis, increase the company’s contribution to biodiversity loss, and the potential for Indigenous people’s land rights violations.
Wolfgang Kuhn, of shareholder group Share Action, one of the signatories of the letter, said: “Pretending that burning trees is sustainable just because an equivalent quantity of carbon is going to be absorbed somewhere, sometime in the future is nonsense.
The letter also warned that Pinnacle uses wood from a climate-critical forest that has been home to Indigenous peoples for millennia, and is a breeding site for more than 3 billion North American birds and the home of many endangered animals. It added that Pinnacle has “a poor track record” of noise and air pollution management, and has had problems with fires at its facilities.
Panorama: The Green Energy Scandal Exposed is on BBC1 at 8pm tonight {3.10.22}
Reference ~ By Sophie Huskisson Health Reporter For The Daily Mail, 3rd October 2022.
Damian Carrington Environment editor For The Guardian, 11th August 2022.
Jillian Ambrose Energy Correspondent For The Guardian, 22nd March 2021.
Tree Weaver 