Sustainable Energy Generation: Burning Trees

John McNally Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Westminster Hall

[John Mc Nally (Falkirk) (SNP)]

As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I thank the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) for her role in securing today’s debate on the sustainability of burning trees for energy.

It is good to see the climate Minister ready to explain the Government case. He is now some three months into the job, and I hope that he will explain to us, and to the public watching this debate, the remarks made by the former Secretary of State for Energy, the right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), that have been mentioned and quoted by others. In August, after three years at BEIS, the right hon. Member said that the burning of imported wood in our power stations,

“doesn’t make any sense to me.”

He further said it “is not sustainable”, and that BEIS was close to saying that the burning of wood for energy

“isn’t working, this doesn’t help carbon emission reduction and so we should end it”

Those are damning words.

The former Secretary of State is not the only Minister to be troubled by the burning of millions of trees in our power stations. A year ago, Lord Goldsmith conceded that there were “real problems” with ensuring the sustainability of the trees being chopped down around the world. It was for that reason that, in January, the Climate Change Committee told Parliament that the “vast majority” of trees should be home grown, not imported on diesel-belching freighters from across the Atlantic. The question is, how many of the 27 million trees burnt by the Drax power station last year were actually home grown? It was not the vast majority; it was not even a tiny fraction. It was zero. Let us be clear that the Government do not seem to agree with the Government on the burning of trees at Drax.

What is actually going wrong, because properly run bioenergy has the capacity to make a real difference to carbon emissions? Why has Westminster made such a complete mess that Ministers are at war with one another? The fundamental problem is that it has become abundantly clear to academics, journalists and even Ministers that Drax is not burning genuine wood waste but trees with many other uses which, as Members have mentioned, include furniture and material for the construction industry, which lock the carbon away. Drax claims that it is only burning forest residues and for years Westminster has simply been lazily allowing it to mark its own homework.

However, over the past year, reality has intruded. The Daily Telegraph has reported that forests in eastern Europe are being clear-cut for Drax; in the USA, CBS News has reported clear-cutting there; and two months ago, as has been said by many others, the BBC’s “Panorama” programme found even worse behaviour in Canada, as Drax was caught chopping down primary forests. Such ecosystems take centuries to create, but they are being destroyed by Drax within hours.

I urge Members to dwell on that statement for just a second, and dwell on the huge loss in biodiversity. Chopping down primary forests is how species become extinct. Drax claims that it is not destroying primary forests, yet “Panorama” said in its broadcast:

“That is a lie.”

It is an extraordinary situation: the BBC’s flagship news programme has accused the Government’s biggest energy provider of telling a fundamental lie. I note that Drax has not sued “Panorama” for libel—not to my knowledge, anyway—and given that Drax does not think that the courts will believe it, why should Parliament believe Drax?

It is clear how quickly trust in Drax is evaporating in this House. Over the last year, 84 MPs have signed letters to Ministers about Drax, calling this situation a scandal. Furthermore, Drax is just not trusted by the financial markets. I hope that the Minister has a contingency plan in place. However, if the likely failure of Drax is a problem, that problem is not to be feared as much as Drax’s possible success, because if other countries were to buy into the Drax model and copy us by burning trees in our power stations, the environmental disaster that the Drax model is already causing would simply become a catastrophe, as other Members have mentioned. Chatham House forecasts that there could be 30 times the current demand for wood pellets. There is already a shortfall of 400 million trees near the wood pellet plants in the USA. Imagine what happens when forests are stripped at 30 times the current rate—and that is just the forests.

We also need to think about the carbon that is emitted as we burn trees. Drax is by far the biggest emitter of carbon in the UK. That is not surprising, because the IPCC says that burning wood creates 18% more carbon than burning coal—it is even worse than coal. However, of the CO₂ produced by burning those 27 million trees, how much was recorded on our national carbon accounts? Zero. Nothing. That is because the Government pretend that all the trees immediately grow back, absorbing the same amount of carbon. That is a fiction, which undermines confidence in the Government’s claim to be reducing emissions. Scientists estimate that where felled trees are replanted, the amount of time it takes for the carbon that has gone up the chimney to be reabsorbed is between 44 and 104 years. We have only 27 years until 2050. Furthermore, the BBC’s “Panorama” disclosed that an official Canadian document showed that only 11% of Drax’s wood was genuine waste that had no other proper use.

What will happen if other countries were to copy our tree-burning behaviour, creating a 30-fold increase in demand for wood pellets? The quality of wood being used for pellets would go up and up, which would push up timber prices and the price of land. The EU’s top think-tank, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council—or EASAC—forecasts that 482 million hectares of land would be needed, which is an area bigger than India. The competition for land between the wood pellet industry and farming would make food price inflation even worse as a consequence. The global biomass industry would be just as thirsty for water. The IPCC says that the demand for water could push the planetary boundaries for freshwater use. Yorkshire Water already has enough problems supplying the region around Drax.

Last year, 500 scientists signed a letter denouncing the burning of trees for energy. Those who believe that the practice is worsening climate change rather than helping in the battle against it now range from Greta Thunberg to the financial rating agency Standard and Poor’s. We had better take heed.

What can be done? First, the Government need to put Drax’s wood-burning boilers at the top of their list of the next high-carbon power stations to mothball. Improvements in grid connectivity, storage technology and the growth of renewables will combine to give us the opportunity to end our dependence on high-carbon Drax. Secondly, as the right hon. Member for Spelthorne said in August, other technologies are advancing far faster and we should invest in them. Thirdly, when the Government’s paper on biomass comes out, there will be no hiding. The media now know that over the last 10 years BEIS has forced consumers to pay £6 billion of so-called renewable subsidies for energy, which the then Secretary of State said is simply “not sustainable”.

The Drax tax is politically unsustainable. There will definitely be no patience for gifting Drax another £31 billion for the pipedream of BECCS. The UK Government’s experiment with burning trees has failed and has turned BEIS not into a global leader, but a global pariah because it destroys forests, is pouring untold amounts of carbon into the skies and pretends that it is emitting nothing.