UK Energy Utility Drax is a large biomass power station in North Yorkshire generating both coal-fired and biomass electricity.
The plant was due to close its coal operations in late September this year, and already switched most of its operations towards biomass, but a few days ago they agreed to extend the life of their two remaining coal-fired electricity generation units through this winter as the government scrambles to shore up Britain’s energy supplies (source: Guardian).
In July 2022 they announced their plans to build the world’s largest carbon capture facility with the goal of removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces, and thereby securing “carbon negative” status (aiming for 2030). The company plans to invest £2bn in the 2020s to develop two bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) units which will capture at least 8 million tonnes of CO2 per year, making it the largest carbon capture and storage project in power in the world.
While the biomass industry claims that bioenergy on its own is carbon neutral, and BECCS will make it carbon negative, the critics say that BECCS technology will not capture the emissions that result from cutting down trees, processing them into wood pellets, and shipping the pellets across oceans to power stations before being burned, so it cannot be carbon-neutral.
I wonder what everyone thinks about these developments.
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Image source: DRAX