Drax in North Yorkshire plans to go carbon negative by 2030 by phasing out coal and scaling up its use of biomass (wood pellets), as it simultaneously removes carbon from the atmosphere using carbon capture technology.
The company is the UK’s largest power plant, and to be carbon negative by 2030 is an ambitious goal! However, environmental groups and experts are skeptical about whether it can even be done because the technology required is yet unproven at a large scale.
The aim is to have the Drax power station in North Yorkshire capturing 16 million tons of carbon every year. That’s more than enough to counter the emissions from its coal and wood pellet run generators. At the moment, they only capture about 1 ton a month.
Eventually, the use of coal will be phased out. The company has already begun scaling up its use of biomass. It has also been removing carbon from the atmosphere, too, then compressing it and storing it under the North Sea. The thing is, both of these technologies being employed as sustainable options (biomass and carbon capture) are controversial.
In the end, if the carbon capture works and the biomass doesn’t cause deforestation, then Drax’s plant would remove more greenhouse gases than it produces every year. At the moment, the plant supplies 5% of the UK’s power, and it would all be emissions-free.
Will Gardiner, Drax chief executive, said:
With the right negative emissions policy, we can do much more, removing millions of tons of emissions from the atmosphere each year.
Drax isn’t the only company using wood pellets, of course. All the businesses that use it say it is effectively a carbon-neutral energy source since the trees from which the pellets are made absorb CO2 as they grow before the pellets rerelease it when burnt. Meaning, it’s a closed-loop system.
Regardless, scientists question the benefits of using wood pellets as fuel at a massive scale, and so hundreds of them got together and wrote to the European Parliament expressing their concern. The problem is that the wood Drax uses has been imported from as far as North Carolina, which produces a lot of emissions during transportation. Furthermore, burning wood provides less energy, so more of it has to be burned.
Almuth Ernsting, a campaigner for Biofuelwatch, says that capturing the carbon released when biomass is burnt is problematic. He said:
Drax has been talking about carbon capture for a long time. But it’s not proven that this technology can work at scale when combined with biomass.
Drax says that on top of all this, it wants to transform one or two of its remaining coal units to gas with up to 200 megawatts of battery storage on site.
Only time will tell if the technologies will work and if it does work, let’s hope that other air pollutants aren’t released that negatively affect our health.
