The UK authorities can’t make up its thoughts about woody biomass electrical energy technology. Earlier this week, enterprise minister Kwasi Kwarteng stated “it doesn’t make any sense” to import US pellets to burn. On Thursday he “fully backed” biomass. Furious energy firms and bureaucrats had presumably utilized thumbscrews in the mean time.
Drax is the UK’s largest biomass generator. Its shares wobbled, as properly they may.
Kwarteng’s division has backed woody biomass for a while. Drax (previously a coal-fuelled generator) and others obtain subsidies. The concept behind woody biomass is that fibre used to make gasoline pellets is spare anyway.
Managed forestry entails scaling down timber and any extra could be possible burned anyway, proponents say. Combine woody biomass technology with carbon seize and storage, they add. Hey presto! Biomass gives not simply low-carbon resolution, however a destructive one.
Lex demurs. Why encourage wooden burning? Already this yr about 6mn tonnes of carbon have been launched from forest fires within the EU and UK, in keeping with the European Commission. Whether timber burned at Drax might be changed like-for-like, locking up launched carbon, is questionable. And if the wooden comes from plantations, it bolsters the financial worth of tree farms that do nothing for biodiversity.
portion of the subsidies for woody biomass should find yourself within the pockets of lumber mill and forestry trade house owners. At least half of Drax’s wooden fibre comes from sawmills in keeping with its personal information. This yr, 80 per cent of Drax’s biomass pellets will ship from North America.
If the biomass mills sat in a closely forested Nordic nation, not denuded Yorkshire, this gasoline would make extra sense. But ransacking forests in America’s south-east, as does US-listed pellet maker Enviva, to ship to Europe for burning is bonkers. Moreover, measured towards different sources of renewable power it’s virtually as costly as coal and pure fuel.
The mixture of biomass burning and carbon seize is a posh resolution to Drax’s need to remain in enterprise in a approach that seems sustainable. The UK ought to focus as an alternative on power that’s unequivocally renewable: wind and photo voltaic.
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Source: www.ft.com