When Greens and Governments get together, there is no end to the insanity. The end result of enviro-policy in Europe is destruction of a forest in the U.S. to burn wood chips to produce electricity in Britain, after you’ve built bigger ports and transport facilities because wood has a lower energy density than coal- all fuelled by taxpayer subsidies.
Thank God for Tony Abbott reversing the craziness in Australia!
Judith Curry reports:
Bonfire of insanity
by Judith Curry
Biomass pellets transported from North Carolina, U.S. are shipped 3800 miles to the UK and burned in Drax power station. Drax is switching to pellets as it is deemed ‘carbon neutral’, even though it belches out more CO2 than coal. – from David Rose
David Rose has a new article The bonfire of insanity. Excerpts:
But North Carolina’s ‘bottomland’ forest is being cut down in swathes, and much of it pulped and turned into wood pellets – so Britain can keep its lights on.By 2020, the proportion of Britain’s electricity generated from ‘renewable’ sources is supposed to almost triple to 30 per cent, with more than a third of that from what is called ‘biomass’.
The only large-scale way to do this is by burning wood, man’s oldest fuel – because EU rules have determined it is ‘carbon-neutral’.
So our biggest power station, the leviathan Drax plant near Selby in North Yorkshire, is switching from dirty, non-renewable coal. Biomass is far more expensive, but the consumer helps the process by paying subsidies via levies on energy bills.
That’s where North Carolina’s forests come in. They are being reduced to pellets in a gargantuan pulping process at local factories, then shipped across the Atlantic from a purpose-built dock at Chesapeake Port, just across the state line in Virginia.
Drax and Enviva insist this practice is ‘sustainable’. But though it is entirely driven by the desire to curb greenhouse gas emissions, a broad alliance of US and international environmentalists argue it is increasing, not reducing them.
Only a few years ago, as a coal-only plant, Drax was Europe’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, and was often targeted by green activists. Now it boasts of its ‘environmental leadership position’, saying it is the biggest renewable energy plant in the world.
It also gets guaranteed profits from the Government’s green energy subsidies. Last year, these amounted to £62.5 million, paid by levies on consumers’ bills. This is set to triple by 2016 as Drax increases its biomass capacity.
Mr Burdett admitted: ‘Our whole business case is built on subsidy, like the rest of the renewable energy industry. We are simply responding to Government policy.’
Company spokesman Matt Willey added: ‘We’re a power company. We’ve been told to take coal out of the equation. What would you have us do – build a dirty great windfarm?’
Meanwhile, in North Yorkshire, the sheer scale of Drax’s biomass operation is hard to take in at first sight. Wood pellets are so much less dense than coal, so Drax has had to commission the world’s biggest freight wagons to move them by rail from the docks at Hull, Immingham and Port of Tyne. Each car is more than 60ft high, and the 25-car trains are half a mile long. On arrival, the pellets are stored in three of the world’s largest domes, each 300ft high – built by lining colossal inflated polyurethane balloons with concrete.
Even if all Britain’s forests were devoted to Drax, they could not keep its furnaces going. ‘We need areas with lots of wood, a reliable supply chain,’ Mr Burdett said.
As well as Enviva, Drax buys wood from other firms such as Georgia Biomass, which supplies mainly pine. It is building new pellet-making plants in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Last month, the Department of Energy and Climate Change issued new rules on biomass sourcing, and will insist on strict monitoring to ensure there really is ‘sustainability’.
But wouldn’t a much more effective and cheaper way of cutting emissions be to shut down Drax altogether, and replace it with clean new gas plants – which need no subsidy at all?
Mr Burdett said: ‘We develop our business plan in light of what the Government wants – not what might be nice.’
Read the whole crazy story here
New Life Narrabri 
In some ways, this isn’t so silly. It looks past the obsession with carbon *emissions*. IF there’s a problem with carbon-compound accumulation in the atmosphere, then the source of the problem isn’t emissions (which are often part of a cycle), but either or both of:
– the transfer of carbon from long-term storage (underground coal & oil) into a short-term or medium term carbon cycle
– reduction of capacity in carbon cycles e.g. by clearing forests, or replacing farmland with concrete.
Put another way, if atmospheric CO2 is increasing problematically, we need to stop talking about emissions, and look at transfer from storage. If you dig it from deep underground, and *then* emit it, that would be the focus.
It does make me wonder though, how did all that coal get down there? I was taught it came from buried trees. That means a lot of organic matter had *previously* been at the surface and participating in the carbon cycle, then somehow, sometime, got buried. I wonder what the earth would have been like prior?
It also makes me think that harvesting wood and using it for houses or paper should be really liked by greens. It takes carbon from the atmosphere, captures in wood, turns it into something useful and locks it up for many years. You can even bury paper once it’s used, which is probably more effective than other carbon sequestration attempts.
All that said, artificial incentives will often produce weird and wasteful results such as the above, especially considering the inconsistencies between different nations.
LikeLike