Sensationalist headline as far as I can tell.
(I wrote the same in a different sub as this seems to have been posted all over)
Comparing carbon emissions and only telling that it is more than another plants/industrial sites, is pretty useless. It needs to be normalized to emissions/kWh so it would be a useful comparison. That alone gives me pause as to how accurate/honest the comparison is.
For example: the plant could be the largest in the country which would mean emoting more is normal. Or it could be the smallest and have a disproportionate emission rate.
It also seems like the spokesperson of the plant claims that the wood is sourced from sustainably managed forests, and though I won’t take that at face value, I see how that could further mitigate impact compared to what the sensationalist headline claims.
I don’t have time right now to do much more research on this specific site such as where the forest is, transportation emissions, processing emissions, etc. However, it is clear that the author of the article didn’t do any research either, and/or intentionally cherry picked a way to display the data to come up with an article that would drive traffic.
Yes, the reporting is incredibly lazy. Such is The Guardian’s standards.
Drax is the largest power station in the UK. Assuming the figures in Wikipedia are in the same ballpark as the nameless report that The Guardian is referencing without citation, Drax has a capacity of 3.9 GW. Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station is capable of producing about 2 GW of net electricity. It’s doubtful they’re actually running either to capacity, but we can estimate that Drax produces roughly double the power as Ratcliffe-on-Soar. That means Drax is still roughly emitting double the carbon per watt.
It would be nice to know whether that figure includes biomass transport across the Atlantic…
edit: typo
You said it, very lazy
I’m not familiar with how the UK decides on dispatching order for power plants, but if they follow a similar protocol as the US where is a combination of marginal cost and emissions, I wound in then expect that the bio-mass plant (with lower expected emissions) will be dispatched more often than the coal fire power station.
That would significantly affect the emissions/kWh
Finally, like you said we would need the transportation emissions and I would ask too for info on whether the source of the wood is a sustainable managed forest. If it is, that wood has near zero emissions as the forest regrows (except for processing emissions)
Additionally, The CO2 emitted from a biomass electricity generation plant isn’t new CO2 pumped out of the ground. It’s the CO2 that was already captured from the atmosphere by living things. On balance, net carbon emission is zero, since the input fuel is a net negative CO2 source.
It’s probably more complex than this. For example, every tree you remove mean less carbon capture in the world.
If you remove a mature tree and replace it with a young one, you will actually increase uptake as the growing tree will absorb more CO2 than a mature one will.
However, I agree that it is complex because you need to take a long term view and there are always risks. For example a wild fire would offsetting the equation as the young trees are more vulnerable.