On Thursday 25^th August 2022 at 7.00am, 2.5GW of energy was being produced by the burning of woodchips. This is used in place of coal and because it comes from trees that are being felled in north America it is claimed to be carbon neutral. The claim is based on the amount of CO₂ that will be soaked up by new tree growth being equal to the amount being released.

An article by Kate Ravilious in Physics World and published online on https://physicsworld.com/a/biomass-energy-green-or-dirty/ includes studies by John Sterman of MIT and Mary Booth an Ecologist from Massachusetts about the rate of release and re-absorption of CO₂ by burning and re-growing trees.

The Drax power station in north Yorkshire has a number of domes, each the size of the Albert Hall to store woodchip pellets. These pellets arrive at Hull, Newcastle, and Liverpool in a continuous stream of ships from north America. Each ship takes 3 days to unload into freight trucks and it takes 37 trains per ship to get the wood chips to Drax, which consumes them at a rate of 24,800 tons a day.

Now woodchip is possibly neutrally buoyant which means it has about the same density as water. Coal is typically 4 times denser than water, which means it only requires ¼ the volume to produce the same energy and ¼ the number of trains to deliver it to Drax. Also, the residue from coal is large quantities of gypsum used to make plasterboard.

Anyway, it has now been determined that burning woodchip produces 50% more CO₂ than coal and the rate at which it is being liberated will take between 40 and 100 years of new tree growth to sequestrate. This means that biomass burning is not carbon neutral and is worse in the short term than burning coal. 

Also, the CO₂ being generated by the lorries, ships, and trains required to transport it from the forests of eastern USA and Canada is being dismissed as insignificant. It is another classic example of the science fiction and creative accounting of the climate lobby.

The UK Independence party would stop this farce and reconvert the Drax power station to burn coal mined in the north of England for which it has been variously estimated to be sufficient to generate the full UK electricity needs for between 300 and 600 years.

Antony Nailer

UK Independence Party – Spokesman for Energy