This appeared in The Daily Mail; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14322465/power-station-green-energy-corruption-burn-matt-ridley.html
From 25,000 feet on a clear day, you can see the biggest wood-fired kettle in the world belching steam, as I did the other day on a flight to Newcastle. Called Drax power station, it lies between Selby and Goole in North Yorkshire and burns the equivalent of 27 million trees every year.
Since it began converting from burning coal 15 years ago Drax has burned an amount of wood equivalent to 300 million trees. Most – and currently all – of this wood was imported from North America because we just do not grow enough here. You would have to burn the entire New Forest every two years just to fuel this one power station.
Drax is strangely reluctant to boast about its unique activity. In a lengthy statement released this week to justify its wood burning its spokesman managed to avoid using the words “wood” and “tree” altogether, preferring to talk about “biomass”. “We understand that we need to do more to demonstrate that the biomass we use is genuinely sustainable and that we are taking the necessary steps to operate our business responsibly,” said the spokesman.
Drax is Britain’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, another record the company refrains from mentioning. It produced nearly 12 million tonnes of the gas in 2023, which is significantly more than when it was burning coal.
That is not counting the emissions from the diesel trucks that bring the trees from the forests to where they are turned into pellets; from the diesel-powered ships that bring the pellets across the Atlantic; or from the trains that finally bring the fuel from the Tyne to Drax.
Incredibly, Drax’s 12 million tonnes of emissions are not included in Britain’s carbon accounts. They are deemed to be emitted in Canada and America – even though the combustion happens in North Yorkshire.
Drax is also Britain’s most heavily subsidised power station, to the tune of £600 million a year. This is paid by you, the consumer, through your electricity bills, which are now the highest in the developed world. That subsidy is necessary for wood burning to be profitable.
So, to summarise, Drax power station is consuming other countries’ forests, turning them into carbon dioxide and being subsidised for doing so. It is a travesty to call this sustainable, renewable, green or clean, let alone economic, yet that is exactly what Drax claims.
Not unreasonably, environmentalists in North America are furious about their forests being cut down purely to be burned, let alone burned abroad, and by a country that lectures the world about reducing emissions.
Ah, says Drax, we are burning the sawdust and brash that is a waste product of the timber industry, made into pellets. Nonsense, say campaigners who repeatedly track Drax’s pellets back to the source and find whole trees being ground up to make the pellets. BBC Panorama “obtained documents from British Columbia’s Ministry of Forests that show the company took more than 40,000 tonnes of wood from so-called ‘old-growth’ forests in 2023.”
This week environmentalists in British Columbia got hold of documents showing that Drax had been asking some of its timber suppliers in the province to lobby the European Union against declaring wood from old-growth forests unsustainable. So it’s not just saw dust and it’s not just plantations – it’s the ancient habitat of moose and bear that Drax is burning.
In any case, whether you burn a whole tree or a pile of brash, you are still depriving a fungus, a beetle or a woodpecker of its lunch. If you burn coal you steal no creature’s livelihood. One of the great benefits of coal, oil and gas is that nothing else eats them so when human beings came to use them, we stopped stealing from nature. Britain’s woodlands regrew because we used coal instead.
Burned wood produces more emissions even than coal, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself. Wood generates about 18% more carbon dioxide than coal per unit of energy (and 45% more than oil, 60% more than gas). It is just about the most carbon-intensive fuel you can choose. Aren’t we supposed to be trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?
Ah, say Drax’s defenders, shaking their heads in astonishment at my naivete, you don’t understand. Carbon dioxide from burning wood is different. It does not warm the earth as much.
How come? Surely a photon of infrared light zooming through the air and hitting a carbon dioxide molecule cannot tell where the carbon atom came from?
The difference, they explain, is that trees regrow, whereas coal seams do not. In chopping down a tree, you make space for another tree to grow in its place. The “lifetime” emissions are therefore lower. On its website, Drax boasts that “the use of biomass pellets reduces our carbon emissions by 80% compared to coal”.
This is specious nonsense. It takes decades for a tree to regrow, and in those decades the carbon dioxide has indeed contributed to global warming. Anyway, as soon as the new tree has absorbed the carbon again, maybe 80 or 100 years hence, you plan to chop it down again and feed it into the furnace.
The truth is that Drax has been pulling a fast one all these years. Its vast wood burning enterprise is bad for birds and bees, bad for the climate, bad for the consumer, and bad for the balance of trade. There is a reason no other nation has chosen to build such huge wood burners of this kind: they make no sense.
I have been pointing this out for more than a decade but was largely ignored or dismissed by the Climate Change Committee and successive government ministers. Last year 138 MPs and peers wrote to the prime minister demanding that Drax’s subsidies for burning trees not be renewed in 2027. This week, debating the Climate and Nature Bill, Sir Roger Gayle MP asked told the Commons “why are we allowing this and why are we paying for this?”
(Incidentally, I have no vested interest in criticising Drax – if anything the reverse. Drax and other wood-fired power stations have helped increase the price of timber, causing me to lose less money on clearing up storm damage in my woodland.)
There is one very good reason not to close down Drax. The lights would go out if we did. Unlike wind turbines and solar panels, Drax’s furnaces are at least reliable. They generate power on demand, day and night. Without them we risk regular blackouts and frequent price spikes. This enables Drax to play blackout blackmail with the Government to try to bounce it into giving more subsidies after 2027, though it has admitted that it would keep offering energy to the grid “on a merchant basis” if it loses all its subsidies. Yet there are less carbon-intensive and just as reliable alternatives to burning wood – like gas.
You and I were not consulted on these decisions. A cosy cabal of crony capitalists decided on our behalf that it would be a good idea to turn a coal-fired power station into a wood-fired one, subsidise it and lie about its worthiness. It was not their money, you see.