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Drax power station burns wood pellets made of trees – a process known as biomass energy – imported from US, Canada, Brazil, and Europe for electricity production. It is the largest producer of carbon emissions in the UK.
The company, which has four sites across England and Scotland and produces around 4% of the UK’s power and 9% of its renewable electricity, started burning biomass in 2010. In 2023, it fully transitioned away from coal.
Drax now claims that it is “enabling a zero carbon, lower cost energy future”. But this is simply not true.
Biomass has been touted as a carbon-neutral alternative to burning fossil fuels for decades, but burning wood releases more carbon dioxide per unit than coal does and, in many cases, requires large monoculture tree farms, made up of rows of single species, often converted from biodiverse forests. These plantations can have devastating impacts for wildlife and the land rights and food security of local and indigenous communities.
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In Papua, Indonesia – for example – the Medco Group, funded by green financing, cleared large tracts of rainforest for timber plantations to fuel its biomass plant, non-profit newsroom, The Gecko Project reported in June 2023.
Much of this land overlapped with the ancestral territory of the indigenous Marind people, traditional hunter-gatherers. Compared to the natural forest it once was, the plantation supports less biodiversity in the area, so the Marind people reported that they found it significantly harder to source traditional foods – often returning empty-handed after hunting trips and being unable to harvest anything from groves of sago, due to mud and chemicals from the plantation.
Growing New Trees Does Not Mean Burning Them Is Sustainable
The fact that suppliers can grow new trees does not mean burning them for energy is sustainable. These biomass schemes do not align with keeping global heating below 1.5ºC, and will likely result in net increases in carbon released into the atmosphere.
Natural forests, unlike the monoculture plantations, are an essential carbon sink, removing and storing large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, playing a natural role in climate mitigation.
Once a tree is felled and burned, it is estimated to take between 44 to 104 years to recover the carbon that was stored by it. The UK’s own goal to reach net zero by 2050 is only 26 years away – we don’t have a century to spare.
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Drax burns the equivalent of 27 million trees annually – twice the number of trees in the New Forest. The cutting and shipping of trees to Yorkshire across the Atlantic in ships likely running on diesel will never be sustainable, but the story goes further than this.
Multiple investigations have found that Drax uses pellets from whole logs sourced from important forests, including taking more than 40,000 tonnes of wood from old growth forests in British Columbia in 2023.
This happens alongside other shipments from hardwood forests in the south-eastern US, as a whistleblower from Enviva, the US company Drax sources pellets from, reported in 2022.
Old-growth forests in Estonia and Latvia have been so degraded by companies including Graanul Invest, which supplies pellets to Drax, in the last decade they can no longer be considered old-growth.
Public Will Pay Three Times Over For New Drax Project
In 2022, Biofuelwatch reported that Drax’s operations were being propped up with around £1.66 million in public money each day and, despite the expense, the UK Government in January approved a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) scheme at Drax.
BECCS theoretically involves the capture and per