The head of the independent government watch dog, the National Audit Office (NAO) has called on the government to rethink how it monitors compliance with its biomass sustainability regime, because it says, at present, the assurances do not provide confidence that the environmental requirements have been met.
Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said ‘government has been unable to demonstrate its current assurances are adequate to provide confidence in this regard … Government must review the assurance arrangements for these schemes, including ensuring that it has provided adequate resources to give it assurance over the billions of pounds involved.’
So far energy companies have received around £22bn in billpayer-backed subsidies to burn wood products, mostly imported wood pellets, to make electricity, with biomass in all supplying around 10% of the UK’s power. However, many environmental groups have opposed this approach arguing that it is not environmentally sustainable. It has been a long running battle focussed mainly on the giant DRAX power plant in Yorkshire. That has been converted from coal burning to wood pellet burning, using pellets imported from North America.
From the green perspective, the basic issue is that, even though biomass growth will reabsorb some of the CO2 produced when it is burnt, it won’t be a fast or complete process: using wood as a fuel interrupts the carbon cycle and disrupts carbon sinks and also undermines biodiversity. So it doesn’t get you anywhere near full carbon neutrality. The government however thinks it is just a matter of improved regulation and control, to get as low carbon and low impact as possible, while the NAO basically just wants more of that. It does not identify any specific abuses of the regulations, but calls for improved assurance and transparency in sustainability requirements, urging the government to review and allocate adequate resources for effective oversight.
In response, a spokesperson for the government said its sustainability criteria were in line with internationally recognised standards, although it said it would be consulting later this year on how the UK could go further. In parallel, Meg Hillier MP, chair of the Committee of Public Accounts (PAC), said: ‘Biomass could have a key role in achieving net zero, but only if it is genuinely sustainable’, so ‘the government should ‘urgently review its assurance arrangements, so it knows that the billions of pounds of consumer and taxpayer-funded support are helping the UK meet its climate targets’.
However, some think the whole think should be abandoned- and that’s not just a view from the greens. Selaine Saxby, the Conservative MP for North Devon, was quoted by the Guardian as saying ‘since we first decided to subsidise energy generation from woody biomass, as part of the transition from coal, it has become clear that the science on the technology has changed. Far more sustainable options have now been developed and improved, such as solar, wind and nuclear power generation, and I call on the government to support these technologies over biomass energy generation.’ Well it’s not clear if Devon would like a shiny new nuclear plant, but it is true that wind and solar have big potentials.
As I have noted before, Drax is, in fact, is looking to move to a new, or at least revised, approach - BECCS, biomass with carbon capture and storage. It would still burn biomass, and would have all the local eco-issues associated with using wood as an energy source, but it would collect the resultant CO2 and store it underground, making it overall, in theory, carbon negative. In reality, CCS is still undeveloped at any significant scale and does not capture all the emissions. But DRAX has run a small BECCS test plant and now wants to go full scale- and that has now got the go ahead. It has met with strong opposition, not least on cost- it was claimed that ultimately the project could cost bill-payers more than £40bn.
You might shave some costs off if you convert some of the captured CO2 into saleable syn-fuel. That’s the Carbon Capture and Utilisation idea (CCU), which the government is also very keen on – it is seen as something to do with the CO2 from hard-to-decarbonise industrial plants. But you would need green hydrogen for that, and, in most cases, if you have that then it would arguably make more sense just use it direct as zero carbon fuel.
We can argue about the merits or otherwise of green synfuels and CCU/S. For example burning synfuels would create CO2 and although partly synthetic, that would have the same climate impact as bio-CO2. Of course there may still be some specific areas where synfuels are valuable, but, adopting a wider perspective, greens ask, in general, can and should we really try to offset fossil emissions by growing and then burning biomass and then (CCUS apart) storing most of the resultant CO2 somewhere for ever (BECCS)?
The government clearly think BECCS can be done, with careful regulation and consistent sustainability rules across all sectors and regimes. But that sounds a bit optimistic, given the state of UK (and US) environmental politics at present… Do we really need to rely so much on BECCS? And/or CCUS? If we want to use biomass, why not stick with domestic and farm bio-wastes and make storable AD biogas from them?
Meanwhile though, DRAX is pressing ahead with its Carbon Capture project and is also looking to expand into what it evidently sees as a growing global carbon removal market. Views obviously differ, but when it comes to large scale geological storage, depending on the location, wouldn’t it make more sense to store green hydrogen or other green fuels for relatively short periods, rather than the results of burning fossil fuels or trees for ever? As it is, although much talked about, CCS, of whatever sort, still does not seem to have made much progress since I last reviewed the state of play. Indeed it may have even slowed down.
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