Blackfriar: This green energy for the masses should be welcomed

Your favourite City scribe was at the Yorkshire Post Environment Awards in Leeds last night, hobnobbing in the green room with Edward Davey, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and Liz Green, our aptly named host for the evening of celebration.

Blackfriar has also been learning about biomass and in particular the residues and thinnings from commercial forests that Drax Group plc is burning at its power station in North Yorkshire.

Your correspondent met the impressive chief executive Dorothy Thompson a couple of weeks ago for a progress report on her plans to create one of the biggest renewable plants in the world in God’s Own Country.

The £700m project will convert three of six units at the station to burn biomass instead of coal and the first unit, converted in April after two years of technical trials, is working “beautifully”, said Ms Thompson.

She also defended the use of biomass against critics who have questioned the environmental credentials of shipping wood products from around the world to be burnt in Britain.

For example, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the RSPB have suggested that burning biomass might actually be dirtier than burning coal.

Drax imports biomass from North America, southern Europe and the Baltics, mostly in the form of little wood pellets.

The FTSE 250 company measures the carbon footprint – the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions – of all the biomass it burns from field or forest to furnace.

“We only burn biomass that delivers major carbon savings,” Ms Thompson told the Yorkshire Post. “We also only source our biomass from sustainable sources.

“In respect of wood, what we take from is sustainable forest. We take from forest where the rate of growth is greater or equal to the amount of timber being taken out.

“When we burn it, you know in short order that forest is going to recapture the carbon because it’s actually growing faster or equal to the rate of extraction.”

The carbon footprint of shipping biomass from the east coast of America is very similar per tonne to transportation by truck from Scotland; Drax said it can transport 50,000-60,000 tonnes at a time via ocean freight, but would need around 1,600 trucks to shift the same amount.

Once the three units are converted by the second half of 2014, Drax will be burning between 7m-8m tonnes of biomass a year.

This will be equivalent to around 10 per cent of Government clean energy targets for 2020, said Ms Thompson.

Stephen Brown, chief technical officer at Yorkshire-based not-for-profit environmental consultancy CO2 Sense, told Blackfriar that large scale biomass power generation projects can make a very important contribution to Britain’s energy security and a low carbon future.

“Biomass fuel sourced from managed forests, backed up with strong sustainability standards, represent a source of energy that can to an extent directly replace the fossil fuels we have used for decades,” said Dr Brown.

“Sustainability standards are overseen by the UK energy regulator Ofgem and mean that use of biomass fuels have to represent at least a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil fuels, to qualify for financial incentives [in the form of public subsidy].”

Dr Brown said it would make no sense to use whole trees for biomass fuel, as the construction and joinery industries offer the highest market value for the long straight sawlogs produced from harvesting mature trees.

He added: “Biomass facilities represent a market opportunity for the UK forestry sector and fuel suppliers.

“While much of the biomass used at sites such as Drax will be imported, these facilities will have a lifetime of several decades and should act as an incentive to extend the scale of managed forests in the country.

“And that would bring a whole range of economic, environmental and community benefits in terms of jobs in rural communities, enhancements in biodiversity and amenity value.”

The debate over biomass will continue, particularly after a BBC report claimed that environmentalists are trying to block the expansion of a transatlantic trade bringing American wood to burn in European power stations.

This came after a joint study from Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the RSPB in 2011 which accused the Government of significantly over-estimating the environmental benefits of biomass.

Our economy ultimately depends on keeping the home fires burning. Britain needs greater energy security and must reduce its dependence on importing gas.

Further, there is not exactly a queue of investors waiting to develop Britain’s ageing energy infrastructure.

Blackfriar welcomes the Yorkshire investment in biomass.