By charles the moderator
We missed this story in May, but in order to replace the use of coal in the UK, power stations are being refitted to burn wood chips. But the UK doesn’t have enough forests to supply the wood chips, (biofuel) so…
Wait for it…
Wait…
Yup, power companies in the UK are planning on purchasing timber in the United States to be converted to wood chips to be shipped across the Atlantic to burn in the previously coal-fired power plants.
From the BBC
Swamp forests in the US are being felled to help keep the lights on in the UK. Is this really the best way to combat climate change?
Environmentalists are trying to block the expansion of a transatlantic trade bringing American wood to burn in European power stations.
The trade is driven by EU rules promoting renewable energy to combat climate change.
Many millions of tonnes of wood pellets will soon be shipped annually to help keep the lights on in the UK. Other EU nations may follow.
Critics say subsidising wood burning wastes money, does nothing to tackle climate change in the short term, and is wrecking some of the finest forests in the US.
The insanity of this is difficult for me to put in perspective, but it seems comparable to shining spotlights on solar collectors.
Read the full BBC story here.
Most people don’t care about the source of electricity. They just want the switch to work. Then complain about the monthly bill.
Shipping cellulose across the Atlantic is no different from any other transportation of goods, the free market will always prevail, eventually.
Since this activity will increase atmospheric CO2, then I’m in favor. We should all be putting as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible. Burning fossil fuels is entirely beneficial to photosynthesis. We should be saving crude oil as a chemical feedstock.
Drax Industries is a lovely company name. I wish the company great success in all future activities.
I’d love to drive a DRAX car, or eat DRAX cereal in the morning.
@bw – that is just it. The free market is not being allowed to work. Clearly it is cheaper and more efficient to burn coal locally. But the government is not allowing that to happen, so they have to import wood from over seas. Greatly increasing both the cost AND energy used to process the fuel source.
I agree with above poster, if the world would just go on a tree planting agenda AGW would be solved in 20 years.
Friends:
It seems that the insanity of wood-burning in Drax is a ‘lesson from history’.
Few remember the ‘acid rain’ scare of the 1980s unless reminded of it but some of its effects remain; e.g. the Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) exists. Importantly, the bureaucracy which the EU established to operate the LCPD still exists. And the LCPD bureaucrats justify their jobs by imposing ever more stringent, always more pointless, and extremely expensive ‘acid rain’ emission limits which are causing enforced closure of UK power stations.
Bureaucracies are difficult to eradicate and impossible to nullify.
The AGW-scare was killed at the failed 2009 IPCC Conference in Copenhagen. I said then that the scare would continue to move as though alive in similar manner to a beheaded chicken running around a farmyard. It continues to provide the movements of life but it is already dead. And its deathly movements provide an especial problem.
Nobody will declare the AGW-scare dead: it will slowly fade away as did the ‘acid rain’ scare of the 1980s. The LCPD is stench from the corpse of the ’acid rain’ scare, and that stench is closing power stations in the UK.
As the AGW-scare fades away those in ‘prime positions’ will attempt to establish rules and bureaucracies to impose constraints which provide immortality to their objectives. The use of wood to replace coal in Drax is a response to one such bureaucratic imposition from the zombie AGW-scare.
Guarding against attempts to establish similar bureaucracies to the LCPD now needs to be a serious activity.
AGW-skeptics have ‘won’ their scientific case (really, nature has ‘won’ it for them), and their political case was ‘won’ in 2009. The present need is to defeat attempts to establish bureaucracies which nullify those victories.
Richard
Didn’t the Easter Islanders sacrifice all their trees to their Gods? Got a lot of funny looking statues out of it. Followed by starvation, cannibalism, and near extinction. Lesson learned. Don’t sacrifice the damn trees to your CO2 and Power Gods!
Roger Sowell says:
August 6, 2013 at 7:53 am
Roger, this is like saying “I dare you not to think about a pink elephant”. I don’t think anybody has mentioned nuclear in this thread. It started with a news item about converting a coal power plant to run on wood pellets, due to UK/EU “renewable energy” mandates. Plenty of comments about stupid Eurocrats, but nobody’s picked on attorneys yet.
I’m sure they will now though.
Roger:
I just checked through this thread and the pro-nuclear advocates have barely uttered a peep to this point. The few comments containing the word were tangential. There was no mention of “attorney”, “lawyer”, “barrister” or solicitor prior to your comment above.
But now that you’ve opened the ball, I’m sure your dance card will be full.
Monty Python is now reality!
chris y says (August 6, 2013 at 6:47 am): “The dried chips are then transported in vacuum-tight cargo containers by diesel-powered ships. Diesel-powered trains carry the containers to the power station. The empty cargo containers are then shipped back to the US for refilling.”
I wonder if the empty containers could be filled with some of that useless British coal, so the ships wouldn’t have to return empty. No doubt Drax could get additional carbon credits for ridding the UK of all that dangerous carbon.
Hmm. I suppose you could get the same effect by encouraging carbon-based Brits to emigrate…
GunnyGene says (August 6, 2013 at 10:44 am): Didn’t the Easter Islanders sacrifice all their trees to their Gods? Got a lot of funny looking statues out of it. Followed by starvation, cannibalism, and near extinction.”
The ecocide of Easter Island may be just another eco-myth.
And hasn’t Coal Mining UK (or is it Coal Field Resources) gone into administration?
They are not allowed to sell much coal to the Government these days. We will not have much longer to wait so see the folly of all this.
Stay cool.
This is a good post. Mowing down forests to replace coal does nothing to improve our carbon emissions, and adds destruction of natural ecosystems for good measure. We of course should be using wind and solar instead, but those resources are more difficult to find in Great Britain.
Anthony, after all these years we finally have a point of agreement.
If that makes you angry, look into the UK’s Renewable Heating initiative – the terms offered for burning this stuff and type of ‘consumer’ who will be able to benefit from them.
@Gordon Oehler Ford
Hey mate, we have been exporting wood pellets to Britain for a long time. In fact many wood mills in BC and Alberta have been using wood waste to produce power for their operations for years. I worked on the site utilities for some 20 years or so ago. Not new technology but it has been getting better and better. And as a person living in BC, you should know BC is wanting to build power plants to run on beetle killed wood. Now, turning waste into electricity at a place where the waste wood is anyway seems to make a lot of sense. But shipping it to Europe in quantities sufficient to supply large power plants seems a bit of. However, we have been shipping wood pellets to Europe for power for many many years – see below:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
MOUNTAIN PINE BEETLE INFESTATION: TURNING WOOD WASTE INTO ENERGY
British Columbia is experiencing an unprecedented mountain pine beetle infestation that has affected several million hectares of trees throughout the province. This infestation is having a significant economic impact on B.C.’s forestry industry and the many communities it helps to support and sustain. The forest fire risk to these communities has also risen as a result of their proximity to large stands of “beetle-killed” wood.
B.C. has developed a bioenergy strategy to promote new sources of sustainable and renewable energy in order to take advantage of the vast amounts of pine beetle-infested timber and other biomass resources. In the future, bioenergy will help meet our electricity needs, supplement conventional natural gas and petroleum supplies, maximize job and economic opportunities, and protect our health and environment.
The production of wood pellets is already a mature industry in British Columbia. Industry has produced over 500,000 tonnes of pellets and exported about 90 per cent of this product overseas in 2005, primarily to the European thermal power industry. Through The BC Energy Plan, BC Hydro will issue a call for proposals for further electricity generation from wood residue and mountain pine beetle-infested timber.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.energyplan.gov.bc.ca/bcep/default.aspx?hash=6
I am embarrassed to be:
1) a Brit,
2) anything to do with the godawful EU.
On behalf of all people in this country with > half a brain cell, I would like to apologise to the rest of the world. In our defence, nonoe of us voted “for” these EU regulations.
@Alan Watt, Climate Denialst Level 7 on August 6, 2013 at 10:47 am
“Plenty of comments about stupid Eurocrats, but nobody’s picked on attorneys yet.”
Anybody know what the energy density of attorneys is?
/SARC
Latitude August 6, 2013 at 6:41 am
This is absolutely silly…why don’t they just burn food
Silly boy… if we throw the food into Drax then what will our cars run on?
_________________________
For those with an appetite for more UK insanity.
Richard North tends to keep on top of the latest wheezes …
Admittedly just a trial but … use the huge numbers (stop laughing up there in the cheap seats) of EU EV’s on the road to act as ‘capacitors’ to the grid, smoothing out the ups and downs of whatever they made a mess of last.
>Pay anyone with a large Diesel backup generator horrendous amounts of taxpayer juice to cover up the mess they have made of a previously fully functional system.
Dyrewulf August 6, 2013 at 6:32 am
I can hear the circus music in my head just thinking about it…
Try living here!
These days the circus music has faded and I get an echo of a rhyme I was taught at ‘baby school’. Until I became an engineer I didn’t recognise its significance.
There was an old Lady who swallowed a Fly … Just about sums up UK energy policy.
Rick K said on August 6, 2013 at 8:58 am:
Well, between the effects of the (planned?) fuel poverty among the pensioners, combined with the cost-saving maneuvers of the NHS, the UK government is already doing a bang-up job clearing out the deadwood. Might as well get one final use out of them.
Plus the fuel is free, as the “loved ones” get a free cremation, and the power plant could get a break on disposal costs by shipping them back a “representative” box of ashes. A true win for everyone.
Imagine as the business picks up and becomes routine, and the power plants can save money using their own delivery trucks. You’ll hear the bell ringing in the street, “Pick up your dead! Pick up your dead!”
“Can you give me a hand with me granddad here?”
“Bugger off, mate! That’s the afternoon truck. Have the paperwork ready, and he better be breathing a lot less than that!”
Eric H. says:
August 6, 2013 at 7:21 am
“On the bright side, lots of jobs are being created in rural places where unemployment was 40% as lumber mills shut down”…”The forests do need to be harvested to manage them properly, but this is not the best idea for use of the harvested timber.”
Indeed, but there is a substantial fraction of the harvested tree that won’t result in lumber, e.g. branches, bark, etc., that wastage could appropriately be used to produce pellets for greater overall efficiency.
tomtre says at August 6, 2013 at 9:45 am
tomtre says:
August 6, 2013 at 9:45 am
Maybe the UK could take all the unneeded extra “U”s they put into words like “color” and burn them.
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Applase!
3×2 says at August 6, 2013 at 11:46 am
Do you really think we have an energy policy?
I wish we had an energy policy.
View from the Solent
Darn, better formatted and far wittier.
My shame…
Good work, Sir (or Madam).
Oh yeah – the first “co-generation” plant I worked on for the forestry industry was about 1977 and my company did some before that. Remember all those old beehive burners the forestry companies used to use to get rid of waste wood. When electrical producers started raising their prices and people started complaining about the smoke, It didn’t take them long to figure out they could use the waste to make power and steam heat their buildings and add some scrubbers to the stacks and have a positive impact on their bottom line by utilizing their own waste product. Now Canada and the US have been fighting about softwood lumber and log exports for decades. So, pelletize the wood and ship it to Europe and Asia, and suddenly we can stop fighting about shipping 2×4’s between Canada and the US, and the Europeans get to feel happily Green. Sure the shipping may be an issue,. but it actually can work for now. I agree it is stupid to haul pellets to a plant sitting on coal. Better to modernize the coal plant but you never know, when wood chip demand/supply changes, one could imagine an upgraded coal fired plant suddenly becoming a good idea.
My uncle in Mississippi, who among other things does a lot of forestry stuff, was telling me about this last year. The wood that is being used is neither suitable for pulp(paper) or construction. It’s the junk wood that the lumber company would be otherwise unable to sell or dispose of.
Mike Roddy:
Your post at August 6, 2013 at 11:26 am provides a very fine example of concern trolling.
It says in total
This post is about the stupidity of burning imported wood chips in Drax.
It is not about the stupidities of wind and solar.
If wind power were sensible then oil tankers would be sailing ships.
Some people want to switch their lights on – not off – when the Sun goes down.
Both wind and solar were abandoned (along with muscle power from slaves and animals) when the greater energy intensity fossil fuels became available by use of the steam engine.
Wind and solar are inefficient, intermittent, unreliable, and expensive. It is not possible for them to power an industrialised economy.
In the unlikely event that you want some factual information concerning your daft advocacy of the impossible (i.e. wind and solar powering the UK) then you may care to read this
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
Richard