An article in Physics World by Kate Ravilious 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 paper reveals 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 woodchip burning is not carbon neutral and is worse in the short term than burning coal.

The CO₂ being generated by the burning of diesel fuel to drive the logging and chipping machinery together with lorries, and trains required to transport it from the forests of eastern USA and Canada as well as the emission of CO₂ by the ships bringing it to the UK is being dismissed as insignificant. It is another classic example of the science fiction and creative accounting of the Net Zero lobby.

The woodchip 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 woodchips to Drax in north Yorkshire, which consumes them at a rate of 24,800 tons a day.

Birch and Ash from North America is four times the volume of coal. There used to be a single huge storage building the size of the Albert Hall to store coal, so now, four times that amount of storage is required at Drax. Coal mined in the UK would save thousands of miles of transport. Also, the residue from coal is large quantities of gypsum used to make plasterboard needed for building homes.

Now it seems that the German owners of Drax have accepted that woodchip burning is producing 1½ times the CO₂ of burning coal and because it won’t be re-sequestered for 40 to 100 years, they have now decided to build Carbon Capture and Storage facilities there, for which the budget is £40,000,000,000 (£40b). Just to produce up to 2.5GW of electricity.

It is the policy of the UK Independence Party to build sixteen of the Small Modular Reactors proposed by Rolls Royce each producing 470MW at a cost of £2b.

This would produce 7.5GW of electricity continuously and together with Hinckley Point C would bring the nuclear generation up to 11GW, about a quarter of our daylight electricity needs, and carbon zero. All at the price of £32b, or £8b less that the Carbon Capture and Storage at Drax.

There is really no point in Carbon Capture and Storage because satellite and

radio-sonde measurements show there is no warming trend due to the rising levels of CO_2.  The only place that global temperature is rising is in the General Circulation Models of the Meteorological Office and the laboratories of the Universities of East Anglia and Exeter.

Antony Nailer

UK Independence Party Spokesman for Energy and the Environment