The North Yorkshire power plant, which burns wood pellets imported from North America
So the trees are grown in America, processed in America and then transported across the Atlantic before getting to Yorkshire? That must use up all the carbon budget before it’s even burnt, surely?
Honestly it might not. I don’t have any actual numbers to offer here, but the sheer size of modern cargo ships often makes then surprisingly carbon efficient despite the horrid fuel they use
For regular products it is actually the remaining way per truck that accounts for the majority of their footprint. Kinda why I usually roll my eyes when people cry about dirty cargo ships, while likely driving their own personal car. There’s so many areas that would be more important to tackle first.
The whole concept of using wood pellets is bonkers though. You’re basically using land to grow trees to burn them, which is stupidly inefficient and certainly not sustainable. It’s pretty much a form of greenwashing, to give people the illusion of climate neutral energy production (similar to things like bio & e-fuels).
The underlying problem is that it’s on net reducing forest cover in North America, but that reduction in forest cover counts against the US emissions budget, rather than the UK one. This kind of shell game where you push emissions into another country doesn’t really solve anything.
I really just don’t think our clean air strategy can involve “keep burning shit for energy”. Wind, water, waves, rays, and atoms yes… but not “burn shit”. Even if it’s useful shit to burn, it’s still a huge carbon release.
Biomass can in theory work fine, since the process of making the fuel (growing plants) removes carbon from the atmosphere. Unless you use fossil fuels in the process of making and moving it, it should be close to carbon neutral
If you’re okay with using forests for carbon capture, then you can just bury the wood underground. There is no justification for setting the wood on fire to generate electricity.
Well the justification is that we need to generate electricity for a number of other reasons. I’m not suggesting that biomass is better than wind or solar, but if there are other reasons that those don’t suit the needs of a specific situation then biomass can make sense since it can be carbon neutral. It is, of course, important to make sure that it actually is that
the article states that drax burning wood produces four times the CO2 of radcliffe burning coal; however it fails to mention how much electricity was produced by each one. i expect better from the guardian, but we didn’t get it in this report.
Also, trees capture CO2 when growing, so it’s not just emitting it like carbon or petrol, it’s a cycle.
Good point. It looks like
Its generating capacity of 3,906 megawatts (MW),
Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station
the station has a capacity of 2,000 MW
That is a good start, clearly crazy is nearly 2x larger in nameplate. However, it also depends on how often they are deployed.
Being that one is consider clean power it is likely dispatched more often. That would result in more numbing hours which would make the difference between the two even bigger.
I saw this article in a different sub and it seems to be just sensationalist header to drive traffic
I mean, a biomass power station should have no net emission, that’s the whole point
Akshually… That trash wood turned into pellets would otherwise rot, which releases CO2, but also methane. And methane is considered a far more powerful greenhouse gas.
So the net is in our favor.
Standing dead forests should be made into charcoal and plowed into food fields, which is very stable stuff and the biogas used instead of natural gas in my opinion.
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.
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.
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)