London (AFP)
The Drax power plant in the UK has grown from one of the continent's most polluting factories to one of the most ambitious in terms of reducing CO2 emissions in just a few years. But his method, replacing coal with biomass, is controversial.
The country's largest coal-fired power plant, located in Yorkshire, in the north of England, started its conversion to biomass ten years ago. It intends to do without coal completely in 2021.
The United Kingdom has decided to stop coal altogether to produce electricity by 2025, and the plants using this resource can now be counted on the fingers of one hand.
That of Aberthaw (RWE group), in particular closed in March, with no conversion plan. The experience led by Drax is all the more scrutinized.
In an interview with AFP, Will Gardiner, the CEO of Drax, highlights a "responsible" wood supply. The CO2 emitted by the burnt wood is captured by the newly planted trees, making the biomass a clean and renewable energy, he assures.
In 2020, four of the six reactors use wood pellets, and a carbon capture system has been installed to reduce emissions. UK Finance Minister Rishi Sunak said Friday he hopes the UK can become a "world leader" in the capture and storage of CO2.
At the COP 25 in Madrid in December, the group went so far as to declare that it wanted to become "carbon negative", by removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than it emits by 2030.
But beyond its contribution to the fight against global warming, biomass "has enabled the plant to continue its activity and maintain" around 900 positions, insists Will Gardiner.
- Capture time -
But the use of biomass, the second renewable energy in the United Kingdom behind wind, is controversial.
In early 2018, 800 scientists wrote to the European Parliament to order it to restrict biomass to residues and waste to limit deforestation.
According to Michael Norton, director of the environment program of the Scientific Council of the Academies of European Sciences (Easac), the problem of biomass is that "it takes between several decades and several centuries" for the new trees to be able to recapture all the carbon released during of combustion.
In the meantime, since wood has a lower energy intensity than coal, the amount of greenhouse gases released is therefore greater. All the more so if transport emissions have to be added, Drax imports North America 80% of the 7.5 million tonnes of wood it burns each year.
The environmental NGO Greenpeace, for its part, describes Drax's plan as "a gamble on the back of humanity".
Will Gardiner replies that Drax mainly uses residues left by other industries, "crowns and branches which would otherwise return to the fields and rot by emitting CO2", while their recovery of residues encourages operators to replant.
As for the 20% of raw materials from trees actually felled for this reason, he recalls that properly maintained forests are aerated by regularly cutting the more puny members.
Gardiner acknowledges, however, that the energy produced from biomass is only part of the solution and that the UK will have to reach 80% energy from wind.
"But you will always need something more" for when there is no wind.
Regarding the time required to capture the CO2 released into the atmosphere, Mr. Gardiner refers to the conclusions of the organization IEA Bioenergy.
The latter affirmed in November that the publication of Easac "includes several errors", maintaining that the combustion of biomass does not generate excess carbon in the atmosphere due to "the dynamics of forest systems".
Easac's publication "has been peer reviewed in an international journal," replied Norton, who is very critical of EIA Bioenergy.
© 2020 AFP