According to a report from Chatham House (the international-affairs ‘think tank’), the UK is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidising power stations to burn wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they have replaced.
Duncan Brack — a former special adviser to the Energy Minister and author of the report — says that cutting down trees and transporting the wood across the Atlantic to feed power stations “produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal”.
He blames the UK’s “rush to meet EU renewable-energy targets”, which resulted in ministers making “the false
assumption that burning trees is carbon-neutral”.
The UK is the EU’s biggest importer of wood pellets for heat and power, importing 7.5 million tonnes last year — mostly from the USA and Canada.
‘Green’ subsidies for wood pellets and other bio-mass were championed by Chris Huhne when he was the Energy Minister of the Coalition Government of 2010-2015.
He is now European chairman of Zilkha Biomass, which is a US supplier of wood pellets. Britain’s biggest power station — Drax — received more than £450 million in subsidies in 2015 for burning bio-mass, which was mostly American wood pellets.
The report says that the Government’s 2015 assessment of the impact on the climate of switching from coal to wood pellets was mistaken, because it ignored emissions from burning pellets in power stations (it only counted the emissions from harvesting, processing and transporting them).
Wood pellets were said to be carbon-neutral, partly because the forests from which they come are re-planted. The new trees would eventually absorb as much carbon as was emitted when mature trees were harvested and burnt, according to the Government assessment. However, Mr Brack says that this process could take centuries.
He added: “It is ridiculous for the same kind of subsidies that go to genuine zero-carbon technologies, like solar and wind, to go to bio-mass use that might be increasing carbon emissions. It’s not a good use of money.
“For any bio-mass facility that is burning wood for energy, unless it is only burning stuff like saw-mill residues or post-consumer waste, its activities will be increasing the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere for decades or centuries; we shouldn’t be subsidising that.
“The companies that make wood pellets and the power stations using them tend to claim that most of their wood comes from residues. In fact, about three quarters of the pellets from the southern USA came from whole trees, with residues accounting for only a quarter.” Mr Brack said that the EU should use to use its present review of energy policies to restrict subsidies to bio-mass that actually reduces emissions.
Nina Skorupska, chief executive of the Renewable Energy Association, said: “This report hangs on the fallacy that it takes decades for a forest to recapture carbon, but that isn’t true. Imagine you have 100 trees, all growing 3% bigger per year.
“You could remove two trees for timber, with the offcuts going to bio-energy, and the forest would still absorb 1% more carbon than the year before; there’s no delay involved.
This is true whether it’s a hundred trees or a hundred million. Bio-mass delivers a massive cut in carbon emissions compared to fossil fuels. The whole supply chain is monitored in detail to ensure that we cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 60% compared to fossil fuels.”
A spokesman for Drax said: “The bio-mass we use is sustainably sourced from working forests where bio-diversity is protected, productivity is maintained and growth exceeds what is harvested. We take the low-grade material to make the compressed wood pellets used to generate electricity.
“There is a widespread scientific consensus that this low-value wood is precisely the material that delivers the biggest carbon reductions.”