Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. It has kept a notionally carbon neutral power station running
Meanwhile has it kick started a coppiced willow industry? No
Has it allowed BECCS to be developed and fine tuned? No
It’s not looking good, but was probably an interesting experiment when it started. The only policy point is that policy allows such things to exist. Policy doesn’t say the specific power station has to continue
DRAX's largesse was supposed to end in 2027 when the ROCs expire but govt have cooked up a transitional plan to keep subsidising this obscene form of generation till 2030 now before they have built the uproven carbon capture storage units. You can be sure these will be late and wont work as intended so that subsidy has to be rolled forward further. The reality is the grid probably can't function with Drax unless someone gets a move on an authorises some extra CCGT in central England so its pretty well a done deal.
With the uplift for recycle value ROCs are now worth over £70 each: I assume a 13% uplift as the average until there is better information. One of the Drax units has a ceiling on its ROCs per year, so it tends not to operate when the economics are less favourable.
Drax does sell ahead a significant chunk of its potential output into hedging markets at forward prices, but the economics of operations compare the margin that could be made by buying in alternative supply for the forward sales contracts from wind, gas etc. in the day ahead market while shutting down their own operations and saving on woodchips against carrying on operating with any ROC subsidy or CFD subsidy or tax. There may be some additional income from ancillary services as well.
The Baseload Market Reference Price is fixed for each summer and winter season, starting in April and October. It is based on average quotations for the season ahead baseload (i.e. even delivery over every hour of the six months) in the preceding six months. It doesn't reflect the basis of operational economics, but it does set the level of subsidy or tax that applies to any CFD unit output in conjunction with the prevailing strike price. Because of the lead time built into the BMRP it resulted in high levels of tax long after prices in day ahead markets had fallen back with the result that the CFD unit only operated in conditions of extreme market stress when spot prices were high enough to cover the cost of the tax and the cost of warming up the plant. Now there is a guaranteed subsidy over the summer, and likely next winter too seeing how low electricity prices are at present..
When the strike price and BMRP are close we get to see the real unsubsidised operation economics against day ahead prices in the use of the CFD units.
First of all, there is no climate crisis, the climate is just doing what it always has, change - secondly, AGW is an unproven, highly politicised hypothesis, used to drive net zero, used to rinse taxpayers and transfer ever more wealth from the masses to the elites - third, CO2 is the gas of life and our atmosphere needs another 400-700ppm for optimal plant & crop growth - fourthly, because of 1-3 above, trying to capture CO2 is utter stupidity and its only aim is to rinse taxpayers and consumers even more through legally corrupt subsidies (at least 50% of which go to globalist elite bank accounts) - One day in the future, people will look back at the climate hoax and net zero scam and wonder, how the hell the masses put up with it
90% of global warming heat goes into the the ocean heat content, so there is much less noise in these figures than there is in surface temperatures, allowing the effects of increasing CO2 emissions to be very clearly seen.
Clearly if ocean heat is steadily rising, then surface temperatures are also going up, though there is more noise in the surface temperature measurements from cyclic variations in solar irradiance, El Nino/La Nina and effects from volcanoes.
There is nothing cyclic about the recent ocean heat content measurements, and no explanation fits them other than that AGW is real and increasing steadily.
One day, and probably very soon, the mass of people will wonder how the fossil fuel industry was allowed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to finance climate denial when the science was very clear. And they may demand full recompense from the fossil fuel industries for their global attempts to deceive and delay action on CO2 emissions.
You may also be interested in a superb study by 3 Polish Physicists, that finds our atmospheric CO2 was saturated at 300ppm, meaning no further greenhouse effect, so at our current, historically low level of 426ppm, any additional CO2 is not increasing overall greenhouse effect
The sheer lunacy of net zero regressions to living standards, is a communist construct - the elites are all in favour of it, for others, not themselves of course - they continue to private jet around with no cares in the world - even the great climerati gods, Al Gore and John Kerry et al (politicians, not scientists) are content to jet around the world, from their water front mansions, telling the proles they must give up their decent living standards to save a boiling earth and stop sea level rises - you can see the hypocrisy surely?
Zharkova et al predict we are in a new GSM from 2020, that will endure into the mid 2050’s, a cooling planet - the last 3 solar cycles (from SC22) have been diminishingly quiet, as has happened in earths past and has been associated with severe global cooling (Maunder Minimum, LIA etc)
Parts of the scientific community have been corrupted by globalist big greenfoolery money in the form of grants and funding, fuelling a ‘consensus’ that is not empirical science, tweaked data and nonsense models, all setting out a never happening doomsday (with clocks even that have been and gone, time after time)
I hope the masses do wake up one day to the nonsense AGW politicised hoax - the pain, misery and impoverishment net zero will force on them, will be a severe dose of much needed reality
I have a recent PhD in physics, as a (very) mature student, during which I took the trouble to attend a 3rd year undergrad course on atmospheric physics, to make sure I really understood climate change. The course was nothing to do with my capacitor energy storage quantum simulations research.
I have read a number of articles from notrickszone (and WUWT too), and they were all deeply flawed.
I reckon it is not me that is hung up, as I have at least taken the trouble to get properly educated on this stuff.
But surely you should be able to spot the flaws in the climate denial picture yourself, without any formal scientific training. Just look at the huge number of different explanations presented on these web sites to explain the rise in temperatures seen at various points. They can't all be right, of course, because they all present different mechanisms. In fact, most of them must be wrong, because, if you pick one, and then say it is right, it rules out many of the others.
So, logically speaking, because you can easily prove to yourself that most of the explanations on these sites are wrong, it is far more likely that they are all wrong than that the mainstream climate science is wrong - because mainstream climate science provides one consistent picture, not dozens of "take your pick depending on what appeals" option.
You even have contradictory posts in your list above - if water vapour drove 89% of 1982-2018 warming then logically shortwave radiation cannot also explain Europe's warming trends in the same period.
And, of course, the Polish article says there has not been any warming anyway since CO2 reached 300 ppm. But there has been, of course.
You really should look at the ocean heat content chart to see how it a) backs up the calculations from mainstream climate science and b) shows a steady climb in heat content for decades. Almost all of the explanations you put up above are dependent on cyclic phenomena, which can't possibly generate a steady rise in heat content.
Sit down and look at the articles on your favourite web sites, and try to work out which are mutually contradictory. You should soon see what I am talking about if you look at it from that perspective.
First of all Peter, well done on your academic achievement - so we can understand each others pov, I am a professionally qualified and competent Electrical Engineer (HV power) and HV Project Manager, with 40+ years of ‘hands on’ experience in the power generation & distribution sectors, having project managed many high value, complex installations & commissioning protocols
You refer to varying theories of rebuttal and that mainstream science provides one consistent picture - we all know that’s not reality - IPCC ‘scientists’ consistently disagree with, or usurp each other, whilst peddling off the scale plain silly armageddon scenarios - as one gets debunked, another six pop up, sillier than the previous ones, as straws are rapidly clutched
The academics and scientists who have signed both the Clintel WCD and Oregon Petition, say quite unequivocally that there is no climate crisis - that includes a few Nobel Laureates who have climate science, geology and atmospheric science competence
The climate alarmism mob are always wheeling out new ‘theories’ that are quickly debunked - their tweaked data is outed and their silly off the scale models are regularly shown to be junk by empirical / proxy real world comparisons
In truth, climate science is still in its infancy and there are many dynamic inputs that are not clearly understood, hence AGW remains an unproven hypothesis that the political class have hijacked as it seems a very good cash cow - telling people the climate will be better if they pay more taxes about sums the whole scam up - meanwhile those scientists and academics that offer alternate views to the official globalist narrative are hounded, harassed, silenced and defunded, that’s not science, it’s corruption (Dr John Clauser for example) - shutting down debate and censoring inconvenient information is a nefarious act that screams ‘fraud’ and the masses are slowly awakening to it - we all want a better world, but some want it all for themselves
"IPCC ‘scientists’ consistently disagree with, or usurp each other, whilst peddling off the scale plain silly Armageddon scenarios - as one gets debunked, another six pop up, sillier than the previous ones, as straws are rapidly clutched"
This isn't accurate. Virtually all climate scientists agree with the big picture that CO2 causes global warming, and I can probably name you the ones that don't on the fingers of one hand.
What the climatologists are doing is to identify possible risks from climate change and attempting to assess the likelihood of them coming to pass, and when. There is a pretty good consensus on the dangerous scenarios that need research, such as a slowing of the Atlantic Conveyor/Gulf Stream, though I doubt anyone would claim to have done enough research to be able to estimate likelihood and duration.
There are many examples from the past where the climate deniers have tried to put words in the mouth of various climatologists, by claiming there was a prediction that never came to pass. The mainstream literature rarely produces a definitive conclusion. "Global cooling" is one that comes to mind, or the disappearance of Arctic ice.
Meanwhile the IPCC reports are a consensus, and include a lot of terms indicating the confidence in conclusions and the likelihood of certain effects being seen.
"climate science is still in its infancy"
This is not true. Ignoring Arrhenius over a century ago, the seminal paper which kicked off climate science properly was Manabe and Strickler 1964 "Thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere with a convective adjustment", where they used a mathematical model of the atmosphere to predict the average equilibrium temperature for various heights, which was pretty close to the measured figures. See https://climate-dynamics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/manabe64a.pdf.
And the mechanisms have been much refined since then. Sure there are a number of things not yet fully understood. But the main issue is that the earth weather/climate system is a random stochastic process which can switch state from time to time, so it is impossible to produce a definitive single model of exactly what is going to happen to surface temperatures everywhere, all the time.
However, the advances in atmospheric physics are apparent when you realise that weather can now be predicted with the same accuracy as 30 years ago, but for a period four times as long. Some of this is due to increased computer power, but some is due to better algorithms too. The increased accuracy also comes from the ability to do ensemble forecasts which use slightly different starting conditions (based on varying the actual measurements at a given point in time).
But in any case you hardly need a sophisticated theory or model to see what the experimental evidence is telling us. We have increased atmospheric CO2 by 50%, and underlying temperatures have gone up by something like 1.2 to 1.6 degrees C, depending on what allowance you make for the current El Nino state. Or you can just look at ocean heat content where El Nino goes away as a significant noise factor.
Measured AGW is real, and there is a consensus mechanism for it, which has not changed for over a century. That is the fact. Whether climate deniers and contrarians get a fair hearing or not, the physics does not change.
You are trying to throw in a lot of political phraseology to cloud those facts. You can scream fraud all you like, for whatever reasons you choose, but all you need to see what is happening is any of the temperature data sets, the ocean heat content chart, and the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements. You seem to ignore this overwhelming, raw experimental evidence.
And there is also no disputing the fact that the fossil fuel companies have consistently funded anti-AGW propaganda to try to slow down the world's response to increased CO2 emissions and global warming. The aim of such lobbyists is to introduce doubt to persuade people it is not worth taking action. Recently they switched from "denial" to "doom, delay and distraction". Because fewer are taken in by climate denial any more, especially the young. It is no longer popular for fossil fuel companies to say there is no warming, so they pay others to say it instead.
Peter, you also seem sure that atmospheric CO2 drives temperature, that isn’t true and temperatures have been far higher than today for most of the earths history:
I could go on and on with evidence that the earths climate has changed ever since the earth formed, sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler and times when temperatures rose while CO2 declined and vice versa
No one, not even you Peter, can say with 100% certainty that AGW is a fact, a proven, empirical fact - as you are a Physicist, you know with 100% surety, that Newtons Laws of Motion are 100% empirically proven fact - that’s the difference between fact and consensus, between fact and self serving misinformation
"And there is also no disputing the fact that the fossil fuel companies have consistently funded anti-AGW propaganda to try to slow down the world's response to increased CO2 emissions and global warming."
A favourite myth of the climate priesthood. The reality is that the AGW crowd far outweigh any countervailing spending, with almost none of that coming from fossil fuel companies, who in fact tend to spend significant sums on AGW proponents: many have simply adopted the attitude that they need to get ahead of government plans. It's the Green billionaires among them Jeremy Grantham (who I think you may be familiar with) who have been pouring vast sums into green propaganda, and getting government, media and yes even fossil fuel companies to follow suit. The quality of much of that propaganda doesn't withstand much scrutiny by anyone with a proper education, which gives rise to many articles that expose the nonsense across websites that cater to doing so.
Like all of them, he thinks the problem is with everyone else because ... you know ... he has a PhD! That's supposed to impress us somehow, even though we can see he's spouting unevidenced garbage.
One advantage of my specific physics PhD, and perhaps more importantly the optional sideline education and research, is that it provides end to end understanding of the detailed processes by which CO2 in the atmosphere causes net incoming heat into the top of the atmosphere.
Perhaps just as valuable are extensive discussion and/or arguments with many climate deniers who put forward many different theories of what is happening to temperatures and why it is anything but CO2 emissions causing them - all with their own individual flaws (the theories that is).
Whether you are impressed or not is irrelevant. The fact is I am not going to be convinced by misinformation put out by climate deniers/fossil fuel apologists, because I have come across just about all of it before.
Before the set of Argo floats was released into the oceans around the milenium, there was no accurate and consistent way of measuring ocean temperatures at various depths, and certainly not the coverage of floats. So the figures around 1960 cannot be relied on to the extent that the temperatures over the last 20 years can - the uncertainty is much greater, earlier on. No one thought it was that important to measure accurately until the 1990s.
I would say CO2 rose slowly until 1950 - and the first part of the 1950s levels were rising only slowly. But the rate of rise became a lot more in the 1960s. If you are saying it was the early 1960s when CO2 started rising much faster, I wouldn't argue - it is somewhat subjective. But the lag in temperature rise means that started later than 1960.
> Question the accuracy of a specific set of data before 1960, while accepting all the other cobblers about proxy measurements going back 1,000's of years.
> Take people for fools while you blatantly lie about the rise in CO2 and choose a lag factor which supports your dishonest, invented narrative rather than any empirical data or coherent argument.
> Base your "evidence" for a climate catastrophe on 50 years of ever-changing measurement technology (accuracy).
There's a word for people like you - and it's not "bright".
It isn't clear that proxy measurements from 1,000s or millions of years are that relevant to the warming going on in the last 50 years. What really matters is the last 50 years. Roughly speaking CO2 has gone up to 420 ppm, and surface (/near surface) temperatures have gone up 1.2 to 1.6 degrees C. Ocean heat content has risen steadily. What more do you need to know?
Are you claiming there is no lag between CO2 emitted, and the temperature rise associated with that? It seems an odd assertion, as most processes have lags. I can surely find a link for you that describes the reasons for such a lag.
I hope the words for people like me are "well informed".
Grantham Institute? You are well connected to the high priests of the Climate cult. That probably makes you less well informed. As Feynman pointed out the easiest person to fool is yourself. And as he also pointed out if doesn't matter what your name is or how clever you are, if theory doesn't match experiment it's wrong.
Just how stupid are you trying to prove yourself to be?
"Before the set of Argo floats was released into the oceans around the milenium (sic), there was no accurate and consistent way of measuring ocean temperatures"
"What really matters is the last 50 years"
The. Millennium. Was. 24. Years. Ago. Pay. Attention. At. The. Back. Clown.
The data on ocean heat content are full of hockey sticks and lack of data about most of the ocean, even now we have the Argo buoys. The adjustment to historic recorded data from ships conveniently fits the climate hypothesis but has a totally inadequate justification in real physics. Satellite era measurements of sea levels and assumptions that changes are largely due to warming expansion are in fact subject to large uncertainty margins. The reality is that data about ocean warming remain very uncertain. We don't even have a couple of decades of Argo data. ZJ are wheeled out to sound impressive - it's zillions! but the actual temperature differences they represent are very small and difficult to measure with any certainty. We have essentially no data on the deep of the oceans.
The Argo float specifications were deliberately designed to make sure the network of Argo floats provided all the information we need to estimate ocean heat content to the accuracy required to estimate warming reasonably accurately. And the number released has also been designed with the same purpose in mind.
The big number is just because the ocean is large. As you say, the temperature differences are small, but not impossible to measure with the desired degree of accuracy. The standard Argo float temperature accuracy is currently 0.001 degrees C (one thousandth of a degree C), and the design target is 0.005 degrees C, so most floats beat that comfortably.. See https://argo.ucsd.edu/how-do-floats-work/.
Current Argo floats do not operate below 2000m, and just over half of the ocean volume is below that depth. But temperature changes below 2000m are very small indeed. Unless you are claiming that increasing temperatures at depths less than 2000m can magically cause the ocean below 2000m to cool, then the Argo float data will provide a reasonable, if probably very slightly low, estimate for the change in total ocean heat content. The same does not necessarily hold true for sea level rise, but that is not what we are talking about here.
There is a "deep Argo" programme, to start to routinely measure temperatures below 2000m across the major ocean basins deeper than 2000m. Two models of deep Argo float are being developed - down to 4000m and down to 6000m. The floats will likely be deployed in large numbers once the deep CTS sensors can achieve the aspirational goals of +/- 0.001 degree C.
Argo float network depth coverage will be improved over time, but there isn't much doubt that the Argo network is fit for purpose and can provide good data on current atmospheric forcings.
Assuming Drax is correct that it uses only waste wood (rather than whole areas of forest felled to become an energy crop), then the effective CO2 emissions for its generation are just over 100 gm/kWh. These come from the supply chain emissions - additional forestry operations to recover waste wood (including sawdust from saw mills), drying and pelletisation, shipping and final UK transport to Drax. Over half Drax supply chain CO2 emissions come from drying and pelletisation. Shipping was around 30% last time I looked, so, within reason, it doesn't matter that much where the waste wood originates (typically southern USA and Canada, but not Australia!).
Until the last year or so, this would have helped bring down the average UK grid average carbon intensity in gm/kWh. But in 2023 the UK grid figure was only 143 gm/kWh. By 2027, grid carbon intensity is likely to at least halve, and is expected to be well below the predicted Drax supply chain emissions figure of something like 95 gm/kWh by then. That would mean Drax pushing up UK grid emissions intensity rather than pulling it down.
So the UK CCC has advised the government to stop subsidies for Drax when the current contract ends in 2027, unless Drax goes negative emissions with CCS. This would mean capturing (probably up to 90% of) the CO2 from the wood burning, resulting in maybe (negative) 800-900 gm CO2/kWh of CO2 extracted from the atmosphere. This would be stored in depleted oil or gas wells.
It would seem a reasonable subsidy to give Drax a carbon price per tonne for its negative emissions, though it is not clear whether Drax will be able to do it for that sum on day one.
Unfortunately the UK carbon price seems to have tanked recently, but the EU ETS price tends to hover around €80/tonne, so maybe Drax should get around £80/tonne for negative emissions from 2027, if it can make the economics work.
It is beyond credible that they can supply millions of tonnes of pellets each year by collecting fallen branches and using offcuts.
They don't count the emissions from burning the wood, assuming that the trees will grow back. But it takes many decades for that to happen. The very decades we are supposed to worry about. In the meantime, the CO2 emissions are higher than burning coal per unit of electricity produced because the energy density of wood is lower than coal. And then there's the particulate emissions, which are probably greater than burning coal:
The EROEI of biomass is low already. A study by the Royal Society of Chemistry suggested BECCS using pellets from North America would have an EROEI of <1, making it a net energy sink. Completely pointless and certainly should not be subsidised.
You are being very dogmatic about something where the details matter hugely, and mainly giving anecdotal examples.
Neither you nor the BBC are supplying any numbers. How much clear felled wood is Drax actually using? 1%, 0.1%, 0.01% of the Drax waste wood use? And there are often commercial reasons why you might want to clear fell sub-standard wood, to prepare the way for a more commercial, higher quality area of cultivation.
Drax says it conforms to Canadian regulations on wood use, so some Canadian or provincial government department has licensed any clear felling that Drax does - or for any Drax waste wood use presumably. Now if you could show Drax was 50% using clear felled wood, I would be the first to protest. But they aren't. There are just the occasional examples which must be a very low percentage of what Drax is using.
You say "It is beyond credible that they can supply millions of tonnes of pellets each year by collecting fallen branches and using offcuts."
This is pure opinion, again with no numbers, and the numbers are against you.
You completely omit two major sources of waste wood in your statement above:-
Firstly there are "thinnings" where part way through growth to maturity of a stand, whole, thin, weedy trees are felled to provide more growing space to the more robust trees in the stand at that time. It is the fully grown mature trees that provide the commercial lumber output of the stand eventually. The stand would be thinned anyway. Prior to Drax using thinnings they might be used for pulp for paper, or far worse just left to rot - which means methane emissions which are far worse than CO2. Drax using thinnings may well be reducing the warming effect.
Secondly, Drax uses sawdust from the saw mills - pretty easy to collect, and there must be a huge volume of it readily available.
The key issue is the fate of the current waste wood produced in North America - if it is burned without energy production, or left to rot, then Drax should be using it. The cost of transatlantic shipping of it is around 30 gm of CO2 per kWh (vs gas generation at 500 gm/kWh), which is peanuts to my way of thinking.
On EROI, the article you cite isn't analysing the EROI of waste wood production at all, but is talking about other energy crops. If I was growing a pure energy crop for BECCS I would grow Eucalyptus in the subtropics, because it can reach maturity in 10 years, but gives a dense form of energy for practical shipping.
I have no doubt there are ways of doing BECCS which would be pointless because the EROI is too low, but we are talking serious waste wood here not non-wood plants.
The supply chain emissions of Drax wood processing were around 100 gm CO2/kWh, compared to CO2 emissions at the point of burning the wood chips of maybe 1200 gm/kWh, so a "carbon payback" of x12 - and the EROI should be similar. Further, half of the supply chain emissions were from drying and pelletisation, and can be significantly reduced using solar PV power to drive pelletisation, and presumably direct solar heat to dry wood.
You say "Overall, burning trees is a very bad idea!"
I don't agree. The devil is in the details, and you haven't gone into detail sufficiently to make the case.
I agree with you that Drax wood chip burning without CCS is rapidly becoming a poor use of UK subsidies, given the near future improvements in the UK grid carbon intensity from all the offshore wind going in. But you haven't put forward any evidence that Drax BECCS using waste wood is anything other than a reasonable use of funds - if Drax can make it work at a reasonable "cost of carbon removal", ideally the EU carbon price of around €80/tonne.
You are being very dogmatic about something where the details matter hugely, and mainly giving invented data. There are lots of reports of Drax burning wood from whole trees - e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160 , and OFGEM has yet to report on its formal investigation as to whether Drax are in breach of the obligations for ROCs. Perhaps we are meant to forget about it. With a need to increase burn by about 30% per MWh to fuel BECCS demand for trees will only increase, making further use of inappropriate sources very likely.
There is also a curious absence of reporting on the performance of the BECCS pilot plants at Drax. Built with fanfare, and then silence. Doesn't compare well with e.g. Shell's hydrogen electrolysis project at Wesseling, for which a lot of detail of the outcome has been revealed.
The economics of Drax operations are easy to work out from the accounts and from observation of their behaviour as market conditions vary. Many specialists have run the ruler over BECCS. Here's a typical conclusion from normally very green EMBER:
Regarding the performance of Drax's BECCS pilot plant, below is a record of an interchange with Drax in 2021. Drax claimed that their pilot was capturing 250kgCO2/h but could not report the capture rate, the parasitic energy demand, nor could they say how many hours of operation at 250kg/h had been achieved.
Drax says they will be capturing 8m tonnes CO2 per year when they have implemented BECCS in 2031/2. Assuming 8000 hours of operation per year, that's 1000 tonnes per hour. Which is 4000 times greater than they reported for their pilot. In my view, this a very unconvincing basis on which to scale up to production-level operation.
Written Responses from Drax Consultation Team 17th to 23rd December 2021
Drax has also responded to questions from Biofuelwatch during a consultation in March 2021, in which it admitted that it had no real-world data for capturing carbon from their biomass units.
Some observations:
1) There’s no data about the amount of energy that will be required to capture CO2 from the plant;
2) There’s no data on the reliability of the technology;
3) Drax has not achieved continuous operation of carbon capture.
Biofuelwatch (17/12/21): Hi there. Thank you for holding this consultation. I have three questions I’d like to ask if I may.
1) How much CO2 has been captured and how much has been stored as part of the joint trial with MHI and over what period?
2) What percentage of CO2 from a biomass unit do you expect to capture in future?
3) Has it been established through the trial how much of a biomass unit’s electricity will be required to capture a set proportion of CO2? Are there trial results from which to deduce the energy penalty?
Drax (17/12/21): Many thanks for your questions
1) I do not have this information to hand, but I can liaise with the project team and get back to you separately via email or telephone.
2) BECCS at Drax has the potential to capture 8 million tonnes of carbon each year in Selby alone – a significant proportion of the 53m tonnes CO2 per year the CCC says are required from BECCS for the UK to become net zero. Again, I do not have this as a percentage, but I can get this information to you.
3) We do not have the exact figures to hand, but I can speak to a project engineer to source this information for you
Drax (19/12/21): Many thanks for participating in the Drax live chat session yesterday. Please find answers to your questions below
1) How much CO2 has been captured and how much has been stored as part of the joint trial with MHI and over what period?
The carbon capture pilot captures around 250 kg/h of CO2. The purpose of the trial was to provide data on the capture of CO2 from biomass flue gas that will help to validate the full-scale design of the capture system.
The CO2 was released into the flue gas stream after capture, as there is not yet any CO2 transportation & storage infrastructure in place for permanent sequestration.
2) What percentage of CO2 from a biomass unit do you expect to capture in future?
The plant will be designed to capture up to 95% of the CO2 in the flue gas
3) Has it been established through the trial how much of a biomass unit’s electricity will be required to capture a set proportion of CO2? Are there trial results from which to deduce the energy penalty?
This was not within the scope of the trial, however, it has been an important consideration in the selection of the vendor and energy efficiency is an essential part of the project design. Specific values are commercially confidential at this point, but this aspect will be considered in the relevant chapter of the Environmental Statement.
Biofuelwatch (22/12/2021): For how many hours have you been able to capture 250Kg/hour without interruption?
Drax (23/12/2021): In response to your questions, the trial unit has been running since mid-2020, during which time it has been regularly taken in and out of operation. The aim of the trial was to not to prove operational reliability, as a pilot plant is not representative of a large-scale process in that regard. Instead, the trial has been successful in its aim of providing data on the interaction of the carbon capture solvent with Drax flue gas.
The whole concept of CCS is based on an unproven AGW hypothesis and is being driven politically as part of the net zero scam to hoover more taxes & funding from taxpayers & consumers - what if, reducing atmospheric CO2 actually hinders the growth of the greenery (which it will - NASA satellite imagery over the last 30 years has clearly shown how our planets green life has benefitted from more atmospheric CO2), to the extent it starts to kill plants & crops (which it will below 150ppm), that has dire ramifications for other life forms on earth
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere, based on an hypothesis, or a consensus between ‘some’ scientists, is dangerously foolish - whether the CCS tech works, or not, it will rinse £billions from hard pressed taxpayers, for perceivably no benefit to them, or the planet
My data is generally from old Drax publications plus various other Internet sources. I don't make up numbers, but do calculate other numbers from the ones available, and I certainly do all my own analyses. For instance, see the information on my web site, which does not include anything on BECCS yet, at https://greenenergytransition.info.
The BBC report says:-
"In total [from the whole of Canada I assume], Drax sourced about 55,000 cubic metres of whole logs - that's more than 1,100 large truck loads - from timber marks containing old-growth forest."
It is worth noting that the BBC Panorama team likes sensationalist reporting, same as a lot of other journalists. If you want an example of a BBC article lacking in objectivity see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49567197. The big point the article misses is that, though a particular chemical used in switchgear, SF6, has huge global warming potential per kg, the CO2 savings from the wind farms etc. where it is used are vastly higher than anything that SF6 can produce. That fact does not appear once in the article, but you can work it out. The journalist maybe didn't think of it, and was unlikely to be able to do the calculations, but an objective article would have done so.
Wood varies in density, but assuming 0.6 tonnes per cubic metre, that would be 33,000 tonnes that Drax took from those timber marks which contained some old growth forest. We don't know the percentage old growth, just "more than 25%". Assume 50%. That is 16,500 tonnes, presumably of waste wood, from old growth areas.
That is 16,500 tonnes out of a total Drax use of 6,500,000 tonnes, which is 0.3%. Of WASTE wood too.
You said "There are lots of reports of Drax burning wood from whole trees"
This isn't in dispute. What we all should want to know is whether these "whole trees" are weedy and immature thinnings, felled to improve the quality of the remaining timber, or whether we are talking about mature whole trees otherwise suitable for timber. And I'm not convinced you are even interested in asking the question, let alone finding out the answer.
A lot of the pictures put out by the anti-Drax brigade (a few of whom I strongly suspect are financed by dark fossil fuel lobby money) show smaller diameter whole trees on trucks compared to pictures of larger diameter mature trees on different trucks headed to saw mills to create commercial timber. These smaller trees are much more likely to be thinnings as far as I can see. The Anti-Drax brigade hopes that the readers of their propaganda won't have even think to ask the question. Certainly the last thing they are going to do is raise the issue. Why not? The answer is very obvious - it surely weakens their case considerably to be objective about it, and the groups have an axe to grind - they want to convert, not educate.
Note that the British Columbia policy on forestry has been evolving, and the Drax policy has been evolving with it. There is no evidence that I have seen that Drax has been cutting down areas of old growth forest (as it doesn't even do its own felling) and using the lot for wood pellets. Only that they have been taking waste wood from these areas when offered it.
You said "With a need to increase burn by about 30% per MWh to fuel BECCS demand for trees will only increase, making further use of inappropriate sources very likely."
That is just pure FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt). As I linked to in the comment above, there is quite a bit of spare waste timber in the USA at this point.
You said, "There is also a curious absence of reporting on the performance of the BECCS pilot plants at Drax."
More FUD.
Well they must be successful enough because Drax is making an investment decision soon for full CCS on moving the first complete Drax unit to full BECCS, and also the government is considering the UK regulations to be implemented for BECCS. The project seems to have government approval.
If you really want to try to find out, put in an FOI request to DESNZ, who have doubtless seen the results. My guess is it would be turned down by the information commissioner as commercially sensitive information though.
You said "Here's a typical conclusion from normally very green EMBER...."
The UK needs to get to net zero by 2050, and ideally before that, and some areas of hopefully low CO2 emissions might be very tricky. One low risk way to get there is to have some plants providing significant negative emissions, which means some currently emitted processes can go on for a while. There is also an expectation that, after getting to net zero, the UK might eventually be asked to reduce its cumulative historical emissions down from the current contribution of 4.6% (and thus the UK is responsible for 4.6% of the current 1.2 to 1.6 deg C temperature rise so far).
Whichever way you do negative emissions is going to cost money, and logically you should give projects subsidies based on the likely future cost of carbon (which is not known for sure, of course). You could do worse than taking the current EU ETS carbon cost of €80/tonne.
If Drax does not provide negative emissions, then something else has to, and at the moment Drax looks like the cheapest option. If the economics are reasonable, Drax should be given a 25 year contract (taking us beyond 2050 with a start date of 2027), for its first two units to fit CCS, and allow the UK to gain the necessary experience with the implementation of these technologies.
Both the UK CCC and DESNZ seem to think Drax BECCS is worth investigating, and I rate their input rather more highly than that of EMBER, though EMBER does some good work in collating coal plant figure world wide.
To me, the key question at present is whether the use of waste wood by Drax reduces the overall global warming compared to burning that waste wood without using the heat, or leaving it to rot. If there is a reduction by sending it to Drax, then Drax should also be given the opportunity to go negative emissions. The current Drax plan is to go BECCS on 2 units out of 6 by 2027, which leaves 4 units which will have to wait. It doesn't make a lot of sense to shut these down for a few years, before re-opening them with BECCS.
If you believe BECCS by Drax is economically unsound, then give me the figures for Drax and for the likely alternatives for negative emissions. If neither you nor anyone else has them, then let us rely on DESNZ and the UK CCC to make assessments.
The National Audit Office seems to have produced a good set of recommendations as to how such decisions should be made, and what the criteria for assuring sustainability should be.
But let us not rely on a bunch of anti-Draxers, some of whom might be funded by fossil fuel money, to make the decision on purely emotional grounds or worse.
You've no need to convince me that the BBC should not be trusted, especially about science related stories - I have given up reading and correcting them, but there is other corroboration of the B.C. story.
The areas of forest under threat from pelletisation grow remorselessly. Drax is trying to open two huge plants in California for instance. Ore in Washington state. And that's just recent action on the West Coast. You cannot pretend that BECCS will lower the demand for pellets: that's just being absurd.
You seem to think that DESNZ and the CCC are superior to EMBER. Clearly you've not looked at the supporting documentation for things like the sixth carbon budget or the studies commissioned by BEIS/DESNZ. You will find they lack their own expertise, and rely on sock puppet consultancies, with EMBER among them.
The point you miss about SF6 is that it makes for excellent propaganda, which is why National Grid have a programme to eliminate it from all their switchgear by 2030 IIRC. They only have to have a few botch jobs to destroy the point of the exercise.
The current CFD strike price for Drax is just under £140/MWh with no carbon capture. That is just above break even, as evidenced by operational behaviour. Add on 30% for parasitic load and a other £10-15/MWh for capital amortisation at a high load factor, and we are just shy of £200/MWh. If would clearly be vastly cheaper to provide baseload from nuclear. It could be done if the ONR pulled a finger out. Clearly RR have lost confidence in the ONR in deciding to scale back their SMR efforts in the UK. I would remind you that wind and solar have pushed out baseload generation, but require dispatchable (gas) to compensate. The only way they will be able to displace more gas is by overcapacity and curtailment. A nuclear solution as in France is a lower carbon grid overall. That should be the aim, not brownie points for trying to turn the North Sea into the next Lake Nyos.
Your conspiracy theories about big oil just mark you out as a jejeune propagandist.
The figures for Drax in 2022 was 2m tons of wood chips from Canada, and 4.9m from the USA, but there are only estimates for the Canadian waste wood from old growth forests. My calculation thus showed around 16,500 tonnes from Canadian old growth forests, so that is less than 1% of the wood chip mass obtained from
I don't believe everything in that mongabay report. The USDA estimates forest wood mass in those southern US states, and it has been increasing since Enviva started to export wood pellets to Drax. That is counter to what the mongabay report said, and I believe the USDA.
Quote me where I said BECCS would reduce biomass requirements. I do not believe I said that. What I said was that the USDA says there is plenty of unused waste wood in the USA.
Yes, I would trust the UK CCC and DESNZ more than Ember, because the first two consult more widely, and don't usually have a particular axe to grind.
Of course everyone is doing what they reasonably can to eliminate SF6 as soon as possible. My criticism of the BBC article was that it was not putting SF6 use into context - its global warming potential is a small problem relative to the warming potential avoided by the CO2 saving made by the power plants which use a few kg of it.
I don't believe Drax should be going for maximum CO2 capture resulting in the 30% parasitic load. The aim is surely to minimise the per tonne cost of the captured CO2, and this is surely best done by going for a less efficient capture with a significantly lower parasitic load to drive it.
But in any case let's take your assumptions of Drax power costing "just shy of £200/MWh", but with a parasitic load of 10% and see where it leads.
Nuclear can't go negative on CO2, so can't beat negative emissions from BECCS. The current (April 2024) CfD price for power from HPC Hinkley Point C is £125/MWh. Very roughly, if the Drax parasitic load can be reduced to 10% (say), Drax supply chain emissions are 100 gm/kWh, the cost of EU ETS carbon is €80/tonne, and direct CO2 emissions from generation from wood chips are 1.1 tonnes/MWh, then Drax may end up with negative emissions of 0.9 tonnes per MWh. If you change €s to £s that means a Drax BECCS at £200/MWh broadly provides £125/MW of similar power to nuclear plus £72/MWh of negative emissions which can be sold, for a total value of £197/MWh. This is within spitting distance of HPC as such accounting sums ought to go.
But, as above, Drax may be able to improve on this.
It is difficult to say whether HPC is more or less controversial than Drax, but financially they are both clearly in the same ball park.
A minor correction Peter - the CCC has not advised the government to stop subsidies for Drax when the current contract ends in 2027.
The recommendation (number R2023-124) CCC made in their 2027 progress report was as set out here:
"Ensure that large-scale unabated biomass power plants are converted to BECCS as early as feasible, and are not given extended contracts to operate unabated at high load factors beyond 2027."
Government's recent consultation on transition subsidies (beyond 2027) for biomass generators who have a credible intention to convert to BECCS acknowledges the CCC recommendation. It nonetheless proposes CfD arrangements, with an indication that there might be an annual cap on generation. They can claim to be compliant with the CCC recommendation using the "high load factors" point.
I imagine there could be a combination of shorter term contracts or longer term contracts with annual generation caps on the unabated Drax units.
The snag seems to be that the first two units go to BECCS in 2027, so there won't be good operational experience on them to make a further investment decision until shortly after, plus then a 3 year lead time to upgrade other units.
Peter, Drax's plan presented during the examination for their Development Consent Order for BECCS at Selby was for up to two of their 4 biomass units to be equipped with carbon capture. The first has an indicative start date of late 2029, the second (if it goes ahead) would follow in 2031. Drax would have to demolish the two unconverted coal-burning units to make space on site if they wanted to equip the other two biomass units with carbon capture. As yet there is no confirmed project to build the pipelines to transport CO2 from Drax to undersea storage.
Peter you are right to point out that with Drax's 'supply chain emissions' at about 100 gCO2e/kWh it's likely that by 2027 they will be above the UK grid average.
One criterion for biomass power to be eligible for Contract for Difference subsidies after 2017 was that ‘supply chain emissions’ (the emissions arising from the growing, harvesting, processing and transport of wood fuel to the power station) should be lower than 29kgCO2e per MWh of electricity generated. This threshold had been tightened from 200kg in 2017, after Drax had completed its coal to biomass conversions. Drax was allowed to continue even though its supply chain emissions in 2017 were well over 100kgCO2e/MWh. Drax’s current supply chain emissions are now being reported as 96kgCO2e/MWh. This figure reflects the high energy requirements of wood pelletisation and the long distance that pellets are shipped from N America to the UK. It is extremely unlikely that Drax’s business model burning pellets imported long distance would achieve the current threshold (29 kgCO2e/MWh) for supply chain emissions. Extending subsidies for Drax post-2027 would inevitably require this criterion to be loosened - exactly the opposite of what's needed to continue making emissions cuts.
And in their submission to a government consultation last year on the subsidy regime for 'Power BECCS', Drax argued that the 29kgCO2e/MWh limit shoidl be waived or relaxed.
29 kg CO2e/MWh seems a bit low right now, as the GB grid isn't going to get that low for a few years yet. But it is surely the right thing to clamp down on emissions for long-term contracts.
I wonder if the distance limitation for shipping would be removed by reverting to a "wood burning" steam ship running off the Drax pellets being shipped?
Subsidies for burning wood imported from abroad must be the biggest madness of the UK’s energy policy.
Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. It has kept a notionally carbon neutral power station running
Meanwhile has it kick started a coppiced willow industry? No
Has it allowed BECCS to be developed and fine tuned? No
It’s not looking good, but was probably an interesting experiment when it started. The only policy point is that policy allows such things to exist. Policy doesn’t say the specific power station has to continue
DRAX's largesse was supposed to end in 2027 when the ROCs expire but govt have cooked up a transitional plan to keep subsidising this obscene form of generation till 2030 now before they have built the uproven carbon capture storage units. You can be sure these will be late and wont work as intended so that subsidy has to be rolled forward further. The reality is the grid probably can't function with Drax unless someone gets a move on an authorises some extra CCGT in central England so its pretty well a done deal.
With the uplift for recycle value ROCs are now worth over £70 each: I assume a 13% uplift as the average until there is better information. One of the Drax units has a ceiling on its ROCs per year, so it tends not to operate when the economics are less favourable.
Drax does sell ahead a significant chunk of its potential output into hedging markets at forward prices, but the economics of operations compare the margin that could be made by buying in alternative supply for the forward sales contracts from wind, gas etc. in the day ahead market while shutting down their own operations and saving on woodchips against carrying on operating with any ROC subsidy or CFD subsidy or tax. There may be some additional income from ancillary services as well.
The Baseload Market Reference Price is fixed for each summer and winter season, starting in April and October. It is based on average quotations for the season ahead baseload (i.e. even delivery over every hour of the six months) in the preceding six months. It doesn't reflect the basis of operational economics, but it does set the level of subsidy or tax that applies to any CFD unit output in conjunction with the prevailing strike price. Because of the lead time built into the BMRP it resulted in high levels of tax long after prices in day ahead markets had fallen back with the result that the CFD unit only operated in conditions of extreme market stress when spot prices were high enough to cover the cost of the tax and the cost of warming up the plant. Now there is a guaranteed subsidy over the summer, and likely next winter too seeing how low electricity prices are at present..
When the strike price and BMRP are close we get to see the real unsubsidised operation economics against day ahead prices in the use of the CFD units.
Here's the history of Biomass CFDs (up to mid April, so generation is back to fairly full capacity levels now).
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Biomass-CFD-Gen-1715539112.4049.png
First of all, there is no climate crisis, the climate is just doing what it always has, change - secondly, AGW is an unproven, highly politicised hypothesis, used to drive net zero, used to rinse taxpayers and transfer ever more wealth from the masses to the elites - third, CO2 is the gas of life and our atmosphere needs another 400-700ppm for optimal plant & crop growth - fourthly, because of 1-3 above, trying to capture CO2 is utter stupidity and its only aim is to rinse taxpayers and consumers even more through legally corrupt subsidies (at least 50% of which go to globalist elite bank accounts) - One day in the future, people will look back at the climate hoax and net zero scam and wonder, how the hell the masses put up with it
Take a careful look at the ocean heat content figures at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-ocean-heat-content. Ocean heat contents has risen steadily since the late 1960s when CO2 emissions really started to take off.
90% of global warming heat goes into the the ocean heat content, so there is much less noise in these figures than there is in surface temperatures, allowing the effects of increasing CO2 emissions to be very clearly seen.
Clearly if ocean heat is steadily rising, then surface temperatures are also going up, though there is more noise in the surface temperature measurements from cyclic variations in solar irradiance, El Nino/La Nina and effects from volcanoes.
There is nothing cyclic about the recent ocean heat content measurements, and no explanation fits them other than that AGW is real and increasing steadily.
One day, and probably very soon, the mass of people will wonder how the fossil fuel industry was allowed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to finance climate denial when the science was very clear. And they may demand full recompense from the fossil fuel industries for their global attempts to deceive and delay action on CO2 emissions.
Peter, you’re still hung up on AGW, an as of yet unproven hypothesis, deeply politicised and symbiotically tied to its arrogant child, net zero
CO2 is the gas of life, our atmosphere is deficient in it, it needs at least another 400-700ppm for optimal greening and crop growth
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CO2_07.jpg
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CO2_5.jpg
You may also be interested in a superb study by 3 Polish Physicists, that finds our atmospheric CO2 was saturated at 300ppm, meaning no further greenhouse effect, so at our current, historically low level of 426ppm, any additional CO2 is not increasing overall greenhouse effect
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/23/3-physicists-use-experimental-evidence-to-show-co2s-capacity-to-absorb-radiation-has-saturated/
Water vapour is far more greenhouse agent than CO2, yet you omit to consider the Hunga Tonga eruption effects on last years temps
https://notrickszone.com/2024/05/02/water-vapor-absorbs-84-times-more-radiation-than-co2-clouds-drove-89-of-1982-2018-warming/
El Niño is collapsing, as is its ocean warming, as another La Niña appears to be fast approaching and with it, cooling oceans
Cloud cover, or lack of it, has also allowed the earth to warm
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/29/post-1980s-increases-in-shortwave-radiation-explains-europes-warming-trends-far-better-than-co2/
The Arctic was warmer than today 10,000 years ago
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/27/nature-publication-researchers-find-arctic-region-10000-years-ago-warmer-than-today/
The sheer lunacy of net zero regressions to living standards, is a communist construct - the elites are all in favour of it, for others, not themselves of course - they continue to private jet around with no cares in the world - even the great climerati gods, Al Gore and John Kerry et al (politicians, not scientists) are content to jet around the world, from their water front mansions, telling the proles they must give up their decent living standards to save a boiling earth and stop sea level rises - you can see the hypocrisy surely?
Zharkova et al predict we are in a new GSM from 2020, that will endure into the mid 2050’s, a cooling planet - the last 3 solar cycles (from SC22) have been diminishingly quiet, as has happened in earths past and has been associated with severe global cooling (Maunder Minimum, LIA etc)
https://freewestmedia.com/2023/09/23/noaa-predicts-zero-sunspots-for-almost-the-whole-2030s/
https://freewestmedia.com/2023/09/26/solar-researchers-sound-the-alarm-to-deaf-ears-severe-cold-and-food-shortages-as-early-as-the-2030s/
Parts of the scientific community have been corrupted by globalist big greenfoolery money in the form of grants and funding, fuelling a ‘consensus’ that is not empirical science, tweaked data and nonsense models, all setting out a never happening doomsday (with clocks even that have been and gone, time after time)
I hope the masses do wake up one day to the nonsense AGW politicised hoax - the pain, misery and impoverishment net zero will force on them, will be a severe dose of much needed reality
https://clintel.org/climate-the-movie/
I put my faith in the signatories of Clintels WCD
I have a recent PhD in physics, as a (very) mature student, during which I took the trouble to attend a 3rd year undergrad course on atmospheric physics, to make sure I really understood climate change. The course was nothing to do with my capacitor energy storage quantum simulations research.
I have read a number of articles from notrickszone (and WUWT too), and they were all deeply flawed.
I reckon it is not me that is hung up, as I have at least taken the trouble to get properly educated on this stuff.
But surely you should be able to spot the flaws in the climate denial picture yourself, without any formal scientific training. Just look at the huge number of different explanations presented on these web sites to explain the rise in temperatures seen at various points. They can't all be right, of course, because they all present different mechanisms. In fact, most of them must be wrong, because, if you pick one, and then say it is right, it rules out many of the others.
So, logically speaking, because you can easily prove to yourself that most of the explanations on these sites are wrong, it is far more likely that they are all wrong than that the mainstream climate science is wrong - because mainstream climate science provides one consistent picture, not dozens of "take your pick depending on what appeals" option.
You even have contradictory posts in your list above - if water vapour drove 89% of 1982-2018 warming then logically shortwave radiation cannot also explain Europe's warming trends in the same period.
And, of course, the Polish article says there has not been any warming anyway since CO2 reached 300 ppm. But there has been, of course.
You really should look at the ocean heat content chart to see how it a) backs up the calculations from mainstream climate science and b) shows a steady climb in heat content for decades. Almost all of the explanations you put up above are dependent on cyclic phenomena, which can't possibly generate a steady rise in heat content.
Sit down and look at the articles on your favourite web sites, and try to work out which are mutually contradictory. You should soon see what I am talking about if you look at it from that perspective.
First of all Peter, well done on your academic achievement - so we can understand each others pov, I am a professionally qualified and competent Electrical Engineer (HV power) and HV Project Manager, with 40+ years of ‘hands on’ experience in the power generation & distribution sectors, having project managed many high value, complex installations & commissioning protocols
You refer to varying theories of rebuttal and that mainstream science provides one consistent picture - we all know that’s not reality - IPCC ‘scientists’ consistently disagree with, or usurp each other, whilst peddling off the scale plain silly armageddon scenarios - as one gets debunked, another six pop up, sillier than the previous ones, as straws are rapidly clutched
The academics and scientists who have signed both the Clintel WCD and Oregon Petition, say quite unequivocally that there is no climate crisis - that includes a few Nobel Laureates who have climate science, geology and atmospheric science competence
The climate alarmism mob are always wheeling out new ‘theories’ that are quickly debunked - their tweaked data is outed and their silly off the scale models are regularly shown to be junk by empirical / proxy real world comparisons
In truth, climate science is still in its infancy and there are many dynamic inputs that are not clearly understood, hence AGW remains an unproven hypothesis that the political class have hijacked as it seems a very good cash cow - telling people the climate will be better if they pay more taxes about sums the whole scam up - meanwhile those scientists and academics that offer alternate views to the official globalist narrative are hounded, harassed, silenced and defunded, that’s not science, it’s corruption (Dr John Clauser for example) - shutting down debate and censoring inconvenient information is a nefarious act that screams ‘fraud’ and the masses are slowly awakening to it - we all want a better world, but some want it all for themselves
"IPCC ‘scientists’ consistently disagree with, or usurp each other, whilst peddling off the scale plain silly Armageddon scenarios - as one gets debunked, another six pop up, sillier than the previous ones, as straws are rapidly clutched"
This isn't accurate. Virtually all climate scientists agree with the big picture that CO2 causes global warming, and I can probably name you the ones that don't on the fingers of one hand.
What the climatologists are doing is to identify possible risks from climate change and attempting to assess the likelihood of them coming to pass, and when. There is a pretty good consensus on the dangerous scenarios that need research, such as a slowing of the Atlantic Conveyor/Gulf Stream, though I doubt anyone would claim to have done enough research to be able to estimate likelihood and duration.
There are many examples from the past where the climate deniers have tried to put words in the mouth of various climatologists, by claiming there was a prediction that never came to pass. The mainstream literature rarely produces a definitive conclusion. "Global cooling" is one that comes to mind, or the disappearance of Arctic ice.
Meanwhile the IPCC reports are a consensus, and include a lot of terms indicating the confidence in conclusions and the likelihood of certain effects being seen.
"climate science is still in its infancy"
This is not true. Ignoring Arrhenius over a century ago, the seminal paper which kicked off climate science properly was Manabe and Strickler 1964 "Thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere with a convective adjustment", where they used a mathematical model of the atmosphere to predict the average equilibrium temperature for various heights, which was pretty close to the measured figures. See https://climate-dynamics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/manabe64a.pdf.
And the mechanisms have been much refined since then. Sure there are a number of things not yet fully understood. But the main issue is that the earth weather/climate system is a random stochastic process which can switch state from time to time, so it is impossible to produce a definitive single model of exactly what is going to happen to surface temperatures everywhere, all the time.
However, the advances in atmospheric physics are apparent when you realise that weather can now be predicted with the same accuracy as 30 years ago, but for a period four times as long. Some of this is due to increased computer power, but some is due to better algorithms too. The increased accuracy also comes from the ability to do ensemble forecasts which use slightly different starting conditions (based on varying the actual measurements at a given point in time).
But in any case you hardly need a sophisticated theory or model to see what the experimental evidence is telling us. We have increased atmospheric CO2 by 50%, and underlying temperatures have gone up by something like 1.2 to 1.6 degrees C, depending on what allowance you make for the current El Nino state. Or you can just look at ocean heat content where El Nino goes away as a significant noise factor.
Measured AGW is real, and there is a consensus mechanism for it, which has not changed for over a century. That is the fact. Whether climate deniers and contrarians get a fair hearing or not, the physics does not change.
You are trying to throw in a lot of political phraseology to cloud those facts. You can scream fraud all you like, for whatever reasons you choose, but all you need to see what is happening is any of the temperature data sets, the ocean heat content chart, and the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements. You seem to ignore this overwhelming, raw experimental evidence.
And there is also no disputing the fact that the fossil fuel companies have consistently funded anti-AGW propaganda to try to slow down the world's response to increased CO2 emissions and global warming. The aim of such lobbyists is to introduce doubt to persuade people it is not worth taking action. Recently they switched from "denial" to "doom, delay and distraction". Because fewer are taken in by climate denial any more, especially the young. It is no longer popular for fossil fuel companies to say there is no warming, so they pay others to say it instead.
Peter, you also seem sure that atmospheric CO2 drives temperature, that isn’t true and temperatures have been far higher than today for most of the earths history:
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/CO2-vs-Temp-30-years-of-falling-temp.jpg
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CO2_07.jpg
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/CET.jpg
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/111-Scotese.jpg
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Fig-I-35.jpg
As for those super computer models, absolute garbage in / garbage out, but you get exactly what you pay for, keeps the narrative funding coming in:
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/114-Christy.jpg
In truth, it’s very cold out in parts of the earth:
https://notrickszone.com/2024/05/08/80c-antarctic-vostok-station-records-extreme-winter-cold-not-even-winter-yet/
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/23/new-ice-age-has-begun-astrophysicist-warns-planet-is-headed-for-an-ice-age/
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/21/winter-weather-slams-into-large-parts-of-europe-madrid-spain-sees-snow/
As for those most scientists agree, apparently not:
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/30/the-97-consensus-claim-is-in-fact-97-bogus/
It’s been a lot warmer and cooler in the earths past:
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/27/nature-publication-researchers-find-arctic-region-10000-years-ago-warmer-than-today/
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/15/antarctica-is-colder-icier-now-than-any-time-in-5000-years-the-last-warm-period-was-1000-years-ago/
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/14/comprehensive-russian-temperature-reconstruction-shows-warmer-temperatures-1000-years-ago/
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/11/three-more-new-temperature-reconstructions-document-a-warmer-medieval-period/
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/107-Alley-GISP-1.jpg
I could go on and on with evidence that the earths climate has changed ever since the earth formed, sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler and times when temperatures rose while CO2 declined and vice versa
https://jeremyshiers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/globalTempAndCo2_last600MillionYears.png
No one, not even you Peter, can say with 100% certainty that AGW is a fact, a proven, empirical fact - as you are a Physicist, you know with 100% surety, that Newtons Laws of Motion are 100% empirically proven fact - that’s the difference between fact and consensus, between fact and self serving misinformation
"And there is also no disputing the fact that the fossil fuel companies have consistently funded anti-AGW propaganda to try to slow down the world's response to increased CO2 emissions and global warming."
A favourite myth of the climate priesthood. The reality is that the AGW crowd far outweigh any countervailing spending, with almost none of that coming from fossil fuel companies, who in fact tend to spend significant sums on AGW proponents: many have simply adopted the attitude that they need to get ahead of government plans. It's the Green billionaires among them Jeremy Grantham (who I think you may be familiar with) who have been pouring vast sums into green propaganda, and getting government, media and yes even fossil fuel companies to follow suit. The quality of much of that propaganda doesn't withstand much scrutiny by anyone with a proper education, which gives rise to many articles that expose the nonsense across websites that cater to doing so.
You won't persuade Peter, he's in a cult.
Like all of them, he thinks the problem is with everyone else because ... you know ... he has a PhD! That's supposed to impress us somehow, even though we can see he's spouting unevidenced garbage.
One advantage of my specific physics PhD, and perhaps more importantly the optional sideline education and research, is that it provides end to end understanding of the detailed processes by which CO2 in the atmosphere causes net incoming heat into the top of the atmosphere.
Perhaps just as valuable are extensive discussion and/or arguments with many climate deniers who put forward many different theories of what is happening to temperatures and why it is anything but CO2 emissions causing them - all with their own individual flaws (the theories that is).
Whether you are impressed or not is irrelevant. The fact is I am not going to be convinced by misinformation put out by climate deniers/fossil fuel apologists, because I have come across just about all of it before.
As a start on such education I would recommend the course "<Making sense of climate science denial" at https://www.edx.org/learn/climate-change/the-university-of-queensland-making-sense-of-climate-science-denial# though there isn't one running at this specific time.
What caused the reported ocean cooling of the 1960's?
And slightly disingenuous to say "since the late 1960s when CO2 emissions really started to take off".
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=~OWID_WRL
Before the set of Argo floats was released into the oceans around the milenium, there was no accurate and consistent way of measuring ocean temperatures at various depths, and certainly not the coverage of floats. So the figures around 1960 cannot be relied on to the extent that the temperatures over the last 20 years can - the uncertainty is much greater, earlier on. No one thought it was that important to measure accurately until the 1990s.
See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=~OWID_WRL. You can argue about whether it was the early or late 1960s. But it doesn't matter that much because there is a lag between more CO2 and full equilibrium temperature rise due to that CO2.
I would say CO2 rose slowly until 1950 - and the first part of the 1950s levels were rising only slowly. But the rate of rise became a lot more in the 1960s. If you are saying it was the early 1960s when CO2 started rising much faster, I wouldn't argue - it is somewhat subjective. But the lag in temperature rise means that started later than 1960.
Cherry-picking clown. So you want to:
> Question the accuracy of a specific set of data before 1960, while accepting all the other cobblers about proxy measurements going back 1,000's of years.
> Take people for fools while you blatantly lie about the rise in CO2 and choose a lag factor which supports your dishonest, invented narrative rather than any empirical data or coherent argument.
> Base your "evidence" for a climate catastrophe on 50 years of ever-changing measurement technology (accuracy).
There's a word for people like you - and it's not "bright".
Here is a link to my article on temperature measurement - https://granthaminstitute.com/2015/10/16/taking-the-planets-temperature-how-are-global-temperatures-calculated/.
It isn't clear that proxy measurements from 1,000s or millions of years are that relevant to the warming going on in the last 50 years. What really matters is the last 50 years. Roughly speaking CO2 has gone up to 420 ppm, and surface (/near surface) temperatures have gone up 1.2 to 1.6 degrees C. Ocean heat content has risen steadily. What more do you need to know?
Are you claiming there is no lag between CO2 emitted, and the temperature rise associated with that? It seems an odd assertion, as most processes have lags. I can surely find a link for you that describes the reasons for such a lag.
I hope the words for people like me are "well informed".
Grantham Institute? You are well connected to the high priests of the Climate cult. That probably makes you less well informed. As Feynman pointed out the easiest person to fool is yourself. And as he also pointed out if doesn't matter what your name is or how clever you are, if theory doesn't match experiment it's wrong.
Just how stupid are you trying to prove yourself to be?
"Before the set of Argo floats was released into the oceans around the milenium (sic), there was no accurate and consistent way of measuring ocean temperatures"
"What really matters is the last 50 years"
The. Millennium. Was. 24. Years. Ago. Pay. Attention. At. The. Back. Clown.
#WarOnMorons.
The data on ocean heat content are full of hockey sticks and lack of data about most of the ocean, even now we have the Argo buoys. The adjustment to historic recorded data from ships conveniently fits the climate hypothesis but has a totally inadequate justification in real physics. Satellite era measurements of sea levels and assumptions that changes are largely due to warming expansion are in fact subject to large uncertainty margins. The reality is that data about ocean warming remain very uncertain. We don't even have a couple of decades of Argo data. ZJ are wheeled out to sound impressive - it's zillions! but the actual temperature differences they represent are very small and difficult to measure with any certainty. We have essentially no data on the deep of the oceans.
Most of this comment is wrong, though not all.
The Argo float specifications were deliberately designed to make sure the network of Argo floats provided all the information we need to estimate ocean heat content to the accuracy required to estimate warming reasonably accurately. And the number released has also been designed with the same purpose in mind.
The big number is just because the ocean is large. As you say, the temperature differences are small, but not impossible to measure with the desired degree of accuracy. The standard Argo float temperature accuracy is currently 0.001 degrees C (one thousandth of a degree C), and the design target is 0.005 degrees C, so most floats beat that comfortably.. See https://argo.ucsd.edu/how-do-floats-work/.
Some of the sensors get retested when an Argo float washes up on a shore and gets returned to the country which made it. Even after some years afloat, the repeatability of the sensor measurements is excellent. For some sensor retesting data see https://www.seabird.com/technical-papers/long-term-stability-for-conductivity-and-temperature-sensors.
Current Argo floats do not operate below 2000m, and just over half of the ocean volume is below that depth. But temperature changes below 2000m are very small indeed. Unless you are claiming that increasing temperatures at depths less than 2000m can magically cause the ocean below 2000m to cool, then the Argo float data will provide a reasonable, if probably very slightly low, estimate for the change in total ocean heat content. The same does not necessarily hold true for sea level rise, but that is not what we are talking about here.
There is a "deep Argo" programme, to start to routinely measure temperatures below 2000m across the major ocean basins deeper than 2000m. Two models of deep Argo float are being developed - down to 4000m and down to 6000m. The floats will likely be deployed in large numbers once the deep CTS sensors can achieve the aspirational goals of +/- 0.001 degree C.
Argo float network depth coverage will be improved over time, but there isn't much doubt that the Argo network is fit for purpose and can provide good data on current atmospheric forcings.
This is infuriating. Have your politicians any shame? How have Tories fumbled the ball so badly?
Assuming Drax is correct that it uses only waste wood (rather than whole areas of forest felled to become an energy crop), then the effective CO2 emissions for its generation are just over 100 gm/kWh. These come from the supply chain emissions - additional forestry operations to recover waste wood (including sawdust from saw mills), drying and pelletisation, shipping and final UK transport to Drax. Over half Drax supply chain CO2 emissions come from drying and pelletisation. Shipping was around 30% last time I looked, so, within reason, it doesn't matter that much where the waste wood originates (typically southern USA and Canada, but not Australia!).
Until the last year or so, this would have helped bring down the average UK grid average carbon intensity in gm/kWh. But in 2023 the UK grid figure was only 143 gm/kWh. By 2027, grid carbon intensity is likely to at least halve, and is expected to be well below the predicted Drax supply chain emissions figure of something like 95 gm/kWh by then. That would mean Drax pushing up UK grid emissions intensity rather than pulling it down.
So the UK CCC has advised the government to stop subsidies for Drax when the current contract ends in 2027, unless Drax goes negative emissions with CCS. This would mean capturing (probably up to 90% of) the CO2 from the wood burning, resulting in maybe (negative) 800-900 gm CO2/kWh of CO2 extracted from the atmosphere. This would be stored in depleted oil or gas wells.
It would seem a reasonable subsidy to give Drax a carbon price per tonne for its negative emissions, though it is not clear whether Drax will be able to do it for that sum on day one.
Unfortunately the UK carbon price seems to have tanked recently, but the EU ETS price tends to hover around €80/tonne, so maybe Drax should get around £80/tonne for negative emissions from 2027, if it can make the economics work.
The BBC has reported that Drax uses clear cut forests:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63089348
It is beyond credible that they can supply millions of tonnes of pellets each year by collecting fallen branches and using offcuts.
They don't count the emissions from burning the wood, assuming that the trees will grow back. But it takes many decades for that to happen. The very decades we are supposed to worry about. In the meantime, the CO2 emissions are higher than burning coal per unit of electricity produced because the energy density of wood is lower than coal. And then there's the particulate emissions, which are probably greater than burning coal:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-40963488
The EROEI of biomass is low already. A study by the Royal Society of Chemistry suggested BECCS using pellets from North America would have an EROEI of <1, making it a net energy sink. Completely pointless and certainly should not be subsidised.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee03610h#:~:text=The%20range%20of%20values%20obtained%20for%20the%20lifetime%20cumulative%20EROI%20and%20ElROI%20are%20presented%20in%20Fig.%205.
The Government is looking at extending the Drax subsidies out to 2030, covered here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/drax-tale-of-dosh-and-beccs
Overall, burning trees is a very bad idea.
You are being very dogmatic about something where the details matter hugely, and mainly giving anecdotal examples.
Neither you nor the BBC are supplying any numbers. How much clear felled wood is Drax actually using? 1%, 0.1%, 0.01% of the Drax waste wood use? And there are often commercial reasons why you might want to clear fell sub-standard wood, to prepare the way for a more commercial, higher quality area of cultivation.
Drax says it conforms to Canadian regulations on wood use, so some Canadian or provincial government department has licensed any clear felling that Drax does - or for any Drax waste wood use presumably. Now if you could show Drax was 50% using clear felled wood, I would be the first to protest. But they aren't. There are just the occasional examples which must be a very low percentage of what Drax is using.
You say "It is beyond credible that they can supply millions of tonnes of pellets each year by collecting fallen branches and using offcuts."
This is pure opinion, again with no numbers, and the numbers are against you.
The USDA estimates 97m tonnes of unused USA forestry waste https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/biomass-supply-chain-report.pdf. Canada must generate something comparable too. Drax uses 6.4 million tons of pellets per year.
You completely omit two major sources of waste wood in your statement above:-
Firstly there are "thinnings" where part way through growth to maturity of a stand, whole, thin, weedy trees are felled to provide more growing space to the more robust trees in the stand at that time. It is the fully grown mature trees that provide the commercial lumber output of the stand eventually. The stand would be thinned anyway. Prior to Drax using thinnings they might be used for pulp for paper, or far worse just left to rot - which means methane emissions which are far worse than CO2. Drax using thinnings may well be reducing the warming effect.
Secondly, Drax uses sawdust from the saw mills - pretty easy to collect, and there must be a huge volume of it readily available.
The key issue is the fate of the current waste wood produced in North America - if it is burned without energy production, or left to rot, then Drax should be using it. The cost of transatlantic shipping of it is around 30 gm of CO2 per kWh (vs gas generation at 500 gm/kWh), which is peanuts to my way of thinking.
On EROI, the article you cite isn't analysing the EROI of waste wood production at all, but is talking about other energy crops. If I was growing a pure energy crop for BECCS I would grow Eucalyptus in the subtropics, because it can reach maturity in 10 years, but gives a dense form of energy for practical shipping.
I have no doubt there are ways of doing BECCS which would be pointless because the EROI is too low, but we are talking serious waste wood here not non-wood plants.
The supply chain emissions of Drax wood processing were around 100 gm CO2/kWh, compared to CO2 emissions at the point of burning the wood chips of maybe 1200 gm/kWh, so a "carbon payback" of x12 - and the EROI should be similar. Further, half of the supply chain emissions were from drying and pelletisation, and can be significantly reduced using solar PV power to drive pelletisation, and presumably direct solar heat to dry wood.
You say "Overall, burning trees is a very bad idea!"
I don't agree. The devil is in the details, and you haven't gone into detail sufficiently to make the case.
I agree with you that Drax wood chip burning without CCS is rapidly becoming a poor use of UK subsidies, given the near future improvements in the UK grid carbon intensity from all the offshore wind going in. But you haven't put forward any evidence that Drax BECCS using waste wood is anything other than a reasonable use of funds - if Drax can make it work at a reasonable "cost of carbon removal", ideally the EU carbon price of around €80/tonne.
You are being very dogmatic about something where the details matter hugely, and mainly giving invented data. There are lots of reports of Drax burning wood from whole trees - e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160 , and OFGEM has yet to report on its formal investigation as to whether Drax are in breach of the obligations for ROCs. Perhaps we are meant to forget about it. With a need to increase burn by about 30% per MWh to fuel BECCS demand for trees will only increase, making further use of inappropriate sources very likely.
There is also a curious absence of reporting on the performance of the BECCS pilot plants at Drax. Built with fanfare, and then silence. Doesn't compare well with e.g. Shell's hydrogen electrolysis project at Wesseling, for which a lot of detail of the outcome has been revealed.
The economics of Drax operations are easy to work out from the accounts and from observation of their behaviour as market conditions vary. Many specialists have run the ruler over BECCS. Here's a typical conclusion from normally very green EMBER:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/16/drax-gets-go-ahead-for-carbon-capture-project-at-estimated-40bn-cost-to-bill-payers
It's economically unsound, and environmentally unsound, and so it seems are you.
Regarding the performance of Drax's BECCS pilot plant, below is a record of an interchange with Drax in 2021. Drax claimed that their pilot was capturing 250kgCO2/h but could not report the capture rate, the parasitic energy demand, nor could they say how many hours of operation at 250kg/h had been achieved.
Drax says they will be capturing 8m tonnes CO2 per year when they have implemented BECCS in 2031/2. Assuming 8000 hours of operation per year, that's 1000 tonnes per hour. Which is 4000 times greater than they reported for their pilot. In my view, this a very unconvincing basis on which to scale up to production-level operation.
Written Responses from Drax Consultation Team 17th to 23rd December 2021
Drax has also responded to questions from Biofuelwatch during a consultation in March 2021, in which it admitted that it had no real-world data for capturing carbon from their biomass units.
Some observations:
1) There’s no data about the amount of energy that will be required to capture CO2 from the plant;
2) There’s no data on the reliability of the technology;
3) Drax has not achieved continuous operation of carbon capture.
Biofuelwatch (17/12/21): Hi there. Thank you for holding this consultation. I have three questions I’d like to ask if I may.
1) How much CO2 has been captured and how much has been stored as part of the joint trial with MHI and over what period?
2) What percentage of CO2 from a biomass unit do you expect to capture in future?
3) Has it been established through the trial how much of a biomass unit’s electricity will be required to capture a set proportion of CO2? Are there trial results from which to deduce the energy penalty?
Drax (17/12/21): Many thanks for your questions
1) I do not have this information to hand, but I can liaise with the project team and get back to you separately via email or telephone.
2) BECCS at Drax has the potential to capture 8 million tonnes of carbon each year in Selby alone – a significant proportion of the 53m tonnes CO2 per year the CCC says are required from BECCS for the UK to become net zero. Again, I do not have this as a percentage, but I can get this information to you.
3) We do not have the exact figures to hand, but I can speak to a project engineer to source this information for you
Drax (19/12/21): Many thanks for participating in the Drax live chat session yesterday. Please find answers to your questions below
1) How much CO2 has been captured and how much has been stored as part of the joint trial with MHI and over what period?
The carbon capture pilot captures around 250 kg/h of CO2. The purpose of the trial was to provide data on the capture of CO2 from biomass flue gas that will help to validate the full-scale design of the capture system.
The CO2 was released into the flue gas stream after capture, as there is not yet any CO2 transportation & storage infrastructure in place for permanent sequestration.
2) What percentage of CO2 from a biomass unit do you expect to capture in future?
The plant will be designed to capture up to 95% of the CO2 in the flue gas
3) Has it been established through the trial how much of a biomass unit’s electricity will be required to capture a set proportion of CO2? Are there trial results from which to deduce the energy penalty?
This was not within the scope of the trial, however, it has been an important consideration in the selection of the vendor and energy efficiency is an essential part of the project design. Specific values are commercially confidential at this point, but this aspect will be considered in the relevant chapter of the Environmental Statement.
Biofuelwatch (22/12/2021): For how many hours have you been able to capture 250Kg/hour without interruption?
Drax (23/12/2021): In response to your questions, the trial unit has been running since mid-2020, during which time it has been regularly taken in and out of operation. The aim of the trial was to not to prove operational reliability, as a pilot plant is not representative of a large-scale process in that regard. Instead, the trial has been successful in its aim of providing data on the interaction of the carbon capture solvent with Drax flue gas.
The whole concept of CCS is based on an unproven AGW hypothesis and is being driven politically as part of the net zero scam to hoover more taxes & funding from taxpayers & consumers - what if, reducing atmospheric CO2 actually hinders the growth of the greenery (which it will - NASA satellite imagery over the last 30 years has clearly shown how our planets green life has benefitted from more atmospheric CO2), to the extent it starts to kill plants & crops (which it will below 150ppm), that has dire ramifications for other life forms on earth
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere, based on an hypothesis, or a consensus between ‘some’ scientists, is dangerously foolish - whether the CCS tech works, or not, it will rinse £billions from hard pressed taxpayers, for perceivably no benefit to them, or the planet
Well said idau
My data is generally from old Drax publications plus various other Internet sources. I don't make up numbers, but do calculate other numbers from the ones available, and I certainly do all my own analyses. For instance, see the information on my web site, which does not include anything on BECCS yet, at https://greenenergytransition.info.
The BBC report says:-
"In total [from the whole of Canada I assume], Drax sourced about 55,000 cubic metres of whole logs - that's more than 1,100 large truck loads - from timber marks containing old-growth forest."
It is worth noting that the BBC Panorama team likes sensationalist reporting, same as a lot of other journalists. If you want an example of a BBC article lacking in objectivity see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49567197. The big point the article misses is that, though a particular chemical used in switchgear, SF6, has huge global warming potential per kg, the CO2 savings from the wind farms etc. where it is used are vastly higher than anything that SF6 can produce. That fact does not appear once in the article, but you can work it out. The journalist maybe didn't think of it, and was unlikely to be able to do the calculations, but an objective article would have done so.
Wood varies in density, but assuming 0.6 tonnes per cubic metre, that would be 33,000 tonnes that Drax took from those timber marks which contained some old growth forest. We don't know the percentage old growth, just "more than 25%". Assume 50%. That is 16,500 tonnes, presumably of waste wood, from old growth areas.
That is 16,500 tonnes out of a total Drax use of 6,500,000 tonnes, which is 0.3%. Of WASTE wood too.
You said "There are lots of reports of Drax burning wood from whole trees"
This isn't in dispute. What we all should want to know is whether these "whole trees" are weedy and immature thinnings, felled to improve the quality of the remaining timber, or whether we are talking about mature whole trees otherwise suitable for timber. And I'm not convinced you are even interested in asking the question, let alone finding out the answer.
A lot of the pictures put out by the anti-Drax brigade (a few of whom I strongly suspect are financed by dark fossil fuel lobby money) show smaller diameter whole trees on trucks compared to pictures of larger diameter mature trees on different trucks headed to saw mills to create commercial timber. These smaller trees are much more likely to be thinnings as far as I can see. The Anti-Drax brigade hopes that the readers of their propaganda won't have even think to ask the question. Certainly the last thing they are going to do is raise the issue. Why not? The answer is very obvious - it surely weakens their case considerably to be objective about it, and the groups have an axe to grind - they want to convert, not educate.
You should read the Drax response to the BBC in detail to understand the timing of some of the BBC's allegations versus the changes to Drax policy. See https://www.drax.com/information-on-our-canadian-sourcing/.
Note that the British Columbia policy on forestry has been evolving, and the Drax policy has been evolving with it. There is no evidence that I have seen that Drax has been cutting down areas of old growth forest (as it doesn't even do its own felling) and using the lot for wood pellets. Only that they have been taking waste wood from these areas when offered it.
You said "With a need to increase burn by about 30% per MWh to fuel BECCS demand for trees will only increase, making further use of inappropriate sources very likely."
That is just pure FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt). As I linked to in the comment above, there is quite a bit of spare waste timber in the USA at this point.
You said, "There is also a curious absence of reporting on the performance of the BECCS pilot plants at Drax."
More FUD.
Well they must be successful enough because Drax is making an investment decision soon for full CCS on moving the first complete Drax unit to full BECCS, and also the government is considering the UK regulations to be implemented for BECCS. The project seems to have government approval.
If you really want to try to find out, put in an FOI request to DESNZ, who have doubtless seen the results. My guess is it would be turned down by the information commissioner as commercially sensitive information though.
You said "Here's a typical conclusion from normally very green EMBER...."
The UK needs to get to net zero by 2050, and ideally before that, and some areas of hopefully low CO2 emissions might be very tricky. One low risk way to get there is to have some plants providing significant negative emissions, which means some currently emitted processes can go on for a while. There is also an expectation that, after getting to net zero, the UK might eventually be asked to reduce its cumulative historical emissions down from the current contribution of 4.6% (and thus the UK is responsible for 4.6% of the current 1.2 to 1.6 deg C temperature rise so far).
Whichever way you do negative emissions is going to cost money, and logically you should give projects subsidies based on the likely future cost of carbon (which is not known for sure, of course). You could do worse than taking the current EU ETS carbon cost of €80/tonne.
If Drax does not provide negative emissions, then something else has to, and at the moment Drax looks like the cheapest option. If the economics are reasonable, Drax should be given a 25 year contract (taking us beyond 2050 with a start date of 2027), for its first two units to fit CCS, and allow the UK to gain the necessary experience with the implementation of these technologies.
Both the UK CCC and DESNZ seem to think Drax BECCS is worth investigating, and I rate their input rather more highly than that of EMBER, though EMBER does some good work in collating coal plant figure world wide.
To me, the key question at present is whether the use of waste wood by Drax reduces the overall global warming compared to burning that waste wood without using the heat, or leaving it to rot. If there is a reduction by sending it to Drax, then Drax should also be given the opportunity to go negative emissions. The current Drax plan is to go BECCS on 2 units out of 6 by 2027, which leaves 4 units which will have to wait. It doesn't make a lot of sense to shut these down for a few years, before re-opening them with BECCS.
If you believe BECCS by Drax is economically unsound, then give me the figures for Drax and for the likely alternatives for negative emissions. If neither you nor anyone else has them, then let us rely on DESNZ and the UK CCC to make assessments.
The National Audit Office seems to have produced a good set of recommendations as to how such decisions should be made, and what the criteria for assuring sustainability should be.
But let us not rely on a bunch of anti-Draxers, some of whom might be funded by fossil fuel money, to make the decision on purely emotional grounds or worse.
Please, don't pretend that the only place where whole trees are palletised in B.C. It's how the industry operates.
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/12/envivas-biomass-lies-whistleblower-account/
You've no need to convince me that the BBC should not be trusted, especially about science related stories - I have given up reading and correcting them, but there is other corroboration of the B.C. story.
The areas of forest under threat from pelletisation grow remorselessly. Drax is trying to open two huge plants in California for instance. Ore in Washington state. And that's just recent action on the West Coast. You cannot pretend that BECCS will lower the demand for pellets: that's just being absurd.
You seem to think that DESNZ and the CCC are superior to EMBER. Clearly you've not looked at the supporting documentation for things like the sixth carbon budget or the studies commissioned by BEIS/DESNZ. You will find they lack their own expertise, and rely on sock puppet consultancies, with EMBER among them.
The point you miss about SF6 is that it makes for excellent propaganda, which is why National Grid have a programme to eliminate it from all their switchgear by 2030 IIRC. They only have to have a few botch jobs to destroy the point of the exercise.
The current CFD strike price for Drax is just under £140/MWh with no carbon capture. That is just above break even, as evidenced by operational behaviour. Add on 30% for parasitic load and a other £10-15/MWh for capital amortisation at a high load factor, and we are just shy of £200/MWh. If would clearly be vastly cheaper to provide baseload from nuclear. It could be done if the ONR pulled a finger out. Clearly RR have lost confidence in the ONR in deciding to scale back their SMR efforts in the UK. I would remind you that wind and solar have pushed out baseload generation, but require dispatchable (gas) to compensate. The only way they will be able to displace more gas is by overcapacity and curtailment. A nuclear solution as in France is a lower carbon grid overall. That should be the aim, not brownie points for trying to turn the North Sea into the next Lake Nyos.
Your conspiracy theories about big oil just mark you out as a jejeune propagandist.
The figures for Drax in 2022 was 2m tons of wood chips from Canada, and 4.9m from the USA, but there are only estimates for the Canadian waste wood from old growth forests. My calculation thus showed around 16,500 tonnes from Canadian old growth forests, so that is less than 1% of the wood chip mass obtained from
I don't believe everything in that mongabay report. The USDA estimates forest wood mass in those southern US states, and it has been increasing since Enviva started to export wood pellets to Drax. That is counter to what the mongabay report said, and I believe the USDA.
Quote me where I said BECCS would reduce biomass requirements. I do not believe I said that. What I said was that the USDA says there is plenty of unused waste wood in the USA.
Yes, I would trust the UK CCC and DESNZ more than Ember, because the first two consult more widely, and don't usually have a particular axe to grind.
Of course everyone is doing what they reasonably can to eliminate SF6 as soon as possible. My criticism of the BBC article was that it was not putting SF6 use into context - its global warming potential is a small problem relative to the warming potential avoided by the CO2 saving made by the power plants which use a few kg of it.
I don't believe Drax should be going for maximum CO2 capture resulting in the 30% parasitic load. The aim is surely to minimise the per tonne cost of the captured CO2, and this is surely best done by going for a less efficient capture with a significantly lower parasitic load to drive it.
But in any case let's take your assumptions of Drax power costing "just shy of £200/MWh", but with a parasitic load of 10% and see where it leads.
Nuclear can't go negative on CO2, so can't beat negative emissions from BECCS. The current (April 2024) CfD price for power from HPC Hinkley Point C is £125/MWh. Very roughly, if the Drax parasitic load can be reduced to 10% (say), Drax supply chain emissions are 100 gm/kWh, the cost of EU ETS carbon is €80/tonne, and direct CO2 emissions from generation from wood chips are 1.1 tonnes/MWh, then Drax may end up with negative emissions of 0.9 tonnes per MWh. If you change €s to £s that means a Drax BECCS at £200/MWh broadly provides £125/MW of similar power to nuclear plus £72/MWh of negative emissions which can be sold, for a total value of £197/MWh. This is within spitting distance of HPC as such accounting sums ought to go.
But, as above, Drax may be able to improve on this.
It is difficult to say whether HPC is more or less controversial than Drax, but financially they are both clearly in the same ball park.
A minor correction Peter - the CCC has not advised the government to stop subsidies for Drax when the current contract ends in 2027.
The recommendation (number R2023-124) CCC made in their 2027 progress report was as set out here:
"Ensure that large-scale unabated biomass power plants are converted to BECCS as early as feasible, and are not given extended contracts to operate unabated at high load factors beyond 2027."
Government's recent consultation on transition subsidies (beyond 2027) for biomass generators who have a credible intention to convert to BECCS acknowledges the CCC recommendation. It nonetheless proposes CfD arrangements, with an indication that there might be an annual cap on generation. They can claim to be compliant with the CCC recommendation using the "high load factors" point.
Robert, thanks for the clarification.
I imagine there could be a combination of shorter term contracts or longer term contracts with annual generation caps on the unabated Drax units.
The snag seems to be that the first two units go to BECCS in 2027, so there won't be good operational experience on them to make a further investment decision until shortly after, plus then a 3 year lead time to upgrade other units.
Much appreciated.
Peter, Drax's plan presented during the examination for their Development Consent Order for BECCS at Selby was for up to two of their 4 biomass units to be equipped with carbon capture. The first has an indicative start date of late 2029, the second (if it goes ahead) would follow in 2031. Drax would have to demolish the two unconverted coal-burning units to make space on site if they wanted to equip the other two biomass units with carbon capture. As yet there is no confirmed project to build the pipelines to transport CO2 from Drax to undersea storage.
In any case the CFD for Lynemouth runs until 2033, and Drax a year earlier.
Peter you are right to point out that with Drax's 'supply chain emissions' at about 100 gCO2e/kWh it's likely that by 2027 they will be above the UK grid average.
One criterion for biomass power to be eligible for Contract for Difference subsidies after 2017 was that ‘supply chain emissions’ (the emissions arising from the growing, harvesting, processing and transport of wood fuel to the power station) should be lower than 29kgCO2e per MWh of electricity generated. This threshold had been tightened from 200kg in 2017, after Drax had completed its coal to biomass conversions. Drax was allowed to continue even though its supply chain emissions in 2017 were well over 100kgCO2e/MWh. Drax’s current supply chain emissions are now being reported as 96kgCO2e/MWh. This figure reflects the high energy requirements of wood pelletisation and the long distance that pellets are shipped from N America to the UK. It is extremely unlikely that Drax’s business model burning pellets imported long distance would achieve the current threshold (29 kgCO2e/MWh) for supply chain emissions. Extending subsidies for Drax post-2027 would inevitably require this criterion to be loosened - exactly the opposite of what's needed to continue making emissions cuts.
And in their submission to a government consultation last year on the subsidy regime for 'Power BECCS', Drax argued that the 29kgCO2e/MWh limit shoidl be waived or relaxed.
(https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/responses_to_beccs_consultation/response/2425977/attach/html/3/EIR2023%2017886%20Drax%20Response.pdf.html)
Thanks again - all good stuff.
29 kg CO2e/MWh seems a bit low right now, as the GB grid isn't going to get that low for a few years yet. But it is surely the right thing to clamp down on emissions for long-term contracts.
I wonder if the distance limitation for shipping would be removed by reverting to a "wood burning" steam ship running off the Drax pellets being shipped?