MP was right to question Drax's carbon capture plans: Yorkshire Post Letters

Contrary to Drax director Bruce Heppenstall’s misleading response (The Yorkshire Post, December 21), Selaine Saxby MP was quite right to call out burning biomass as unsustainable earlier this month in a Parliamentary debate.

I work for Zero Hour, a group campaigning for science-led action on the climate and nature crisis.

Our new Ambition Gap report, written with the help of leading scientists like Prof Mike Berners-Lee, stresses that technologies like Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) ‘will make the situation worse, wasting precious public funds and time’.

The report explains that ‘as well as causing damage to nature and human health, BECCS is not even carbon negative.

This is due to emissions in logging, chipping and shipping, and the decades-long time lag before replanted woodland begins to re-absorb the carbon lost burning the wood’.

As reported this October by BBC Panorama, Drax is cutting down primary forest in Canada for bioenergy.

This is releasing enormous amounts of CO2 and pushing us perilously close to irreversible tipping points beyond which we risk losing control of the climate for good.

The cost of BECCS at Drax to the taxpayer is estimated at an eye-watering £31.7 billion, for a technology roundly dismissed by scientists as incapable of delivering on its claims.

In fact, the science shows that BECCS will actually make climate change worse by adding to atmospheric CO2 in the short term.

Drax’s thirst for timber is also taking a terrible toll on the natural world, just when scientists are issuing urgent warnings about the need to restore nature before ecosystems collapse past the point of no return.

I urge our politicians to stop wasting public money on Drax.

The good news is that the latest science shows that we can decarbonise our energy system without the need for BECCS, by using a combination of clean renewables, a range of storage options, and by improving connections with neighbouring nations.

I ask Drax to deploy their considerable technical and financial clout in embracing the clean energy revolution.

From: Clark Cross, Springfield Road, Linlithgow.

Bruce Heppenstall plant director at the Drax power plant says that Selaine Saxby MP is wrong to say "burning biomass is not sustainable".

But Selaine Saxby is correct.

First of all the greenhouse gases incurred in chopping down trees in the US and Canada and turning them into wood pellets, the transport and then shipping them 2,000 miles to Drax should be allocated to Drax.

They are not.

On the National Grid live website, biomass is not shown under the renewables heading.

As for the promised 10,000 jobs that carbon capture and storage would bring, similar promises were made by the wind industry but these went to foreign manufacturers and foreign workers.

Nowhere in the world has the mythical Carbon Capture and Storage beast been found.