The most misleading talking points of the UK Government on biomass were on full display at the recent oral hearings by the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) concerning biomass (and Drax).
The following is a summary of some of the most important moments of the hearing – moments when officials from the Department of Energy and Net Zero (DESNZ) and Ofgem (responsible for tracking data on biomass “sustainability”) demonstrated that they are not capable of protecting forests and the climate, and moments when the PAC members themselves missed important opportunities to ask follow-up questions.
Cast of characters:
Several people participated in the hearing. The witnesses were Jeremy Pocklington, Permanent Secretary, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero; Ashley Ibbett, Director General, Energy Infrastructure, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero; Dr Sarah Redwood OBE, Director, Renewable Energy Deployment, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero; Jonathan Brearley, Chief Executive, Ofgem; Kiera Schoenemann, Director of Audit and Compliance, Ofgem
The Chair of the committee is Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, and MP Chris Hinchliff, who also sits on the Environmental Audit Committee, asked excellent questions.
For those who care most about stopping forest destruction in the name of “green energy,” the following are some of the most important points from the hearing.
The government is wrong to claim that biomass is chiefly sourced from wood waste
Drax’s own reporting shows that they use more trees than sawdust to make pellets (see Drax 2023 annual report page 74), and we’ve all seen the pictures of the clearcuts and of the massive logs piled on trucks going back to pellet manufacturing plants in the US Southeast and Canada (click here to watch the BBC’s Panorama expose). So why did Sarah Redwood, Director General of Renewable Energy Deployment, keep pretending in the hearing that only “waste” wood is used to make pellets?
At 16:58:23 of the full hearing, the Chair sensibly asked if biomass from abroad can be sustainable in the future.
To this Dr. Redwood replied: “This comes down to as Jeremy was saying the counterfactual about what happens to the waste; so these are wastes from the timber industry; used for construction, particularly, and for other uses; so it’s the waste that goes aside; in the Biomass Strategy, we looked at a range of different scenarios and you’re right the UK does have a greater share of the biomass compared to globally, but under those scenarios we considered that there would be sufficient quantities for the usage [indistinguishable] that we’ve been setting out.”
But we can see it’s not waste. We’ve all seen the news reporting, the pictures, the films. NGOs and journalists have gone to the logging sites, watched the trees get cut down and piled on trucks, then followed the trucks back to the pellet plants. Does Dr. Redwood think that lawmakers and the public can forget what they’ve seen? On the other hand, this is the same government team that published the wildly implausible biomass modeling that pretends biomass is going to be imported from North Korea. Why has the UK Government farmed out something as important as its renewable energy policy to modelers who are so out of touch with the reality of what is actually burned as biomass?
Main message for policymakers: You can’t trust these bureaucrats to provide accurate information on the current and future sources of biomass. Beware, and educate yourselves. Start with our analysis of their “Biomass Resource Model”, which unpacks the most unrealistic of their modeling assumptions.
Logging for pellets destroys forests, and the UK government has no intention of stopping this
The Government claimed for years that the biomass “sustainability” criteria were robust and protective, but now they’ve finally admitted what was in plain sight all along – their own criteria allowed logging and burning primary and old-growth forests for energy. Thus, it hardly mattered that Drax couldn’t say how much wood was “unsustainable” since the government’s criteria didn’t protect these forests anyway. That’s probably why Drax got away with a small fine and a slap on the wrist for shoddy data reporting – because practically everything but burning baby wolves is considered “sustainable” under the biomass criteria.
The government however now claims that, no, really, this time the new criteria will truly be robust. But why would anyone trust them now, given that they were knowingly paying Drax billions to destroy primary and old-growth forests?
But also, listen to what they are saying here in this hearing. They’re saying it’s going to be business as usual.
They’re saying it will be business as usual because Drax will still be able to make pellets and generate power by burning wood from primary and old-growth forests, even if the new “reforms” mean the company can no longer get subsidies for that power. (If the government were even a little bit serious about protecting forests and the climate, they’d say that no energy can be produced from trees, full stop, whether subsidized or not).
They’re saying it will be business as usual because the government has made no mention of protecting forests in general – just primary forests and old-growth. Guess how much of the US forests that Drax and other pellet companies log for biomass are classified as primary and old-growth? The answer is “approximately zero.” So stopping subsidies for primary and old-growth won’t do anything to protect US forests, or Estonian forests, or Latvian forests… all places that Drax makes or buys pellets. Logging and forest destruction will continue just like before. The government knows that, and Drax knows that. That’s the plan.
They’re saying it will be business as usual because they can’t get people out into the forest to actually see what’s going on. They literally say that. Listen in the following clip to what J. Pocklington says about “the degree of proportionality” needed for oversight (implying, it’s not worth working to truly protect forests) and the difficulty of actual monitoring in response to Chris Hinchcliff’s question about self-certification.
CLIP 1
Regarding Ofgem, which is responsible for collecting the data on “sustainability” and sourcing, Ms. Schoenemann clarifies that Ofgem doesn’t check, either. At 15:58:41 of the full hearing, she says, “Ofgem’s role is not to conduct a forensic analysis of that data; what we do do, is we provide spot-checks and we check more or less if we’re confident in the data that we’re seeing.” Then she adds, “what’s really important” is that the nature of the breach did not impact the subsidies received by Drax. In other words, it didn’t matter that Drax couldn’t identify how much primary and old-growth forests it had burned, because the UK government didn’t really care about that, anyway.
Main message for policymakers: Currently, about 44% of Drax’s fuel comes from sawmill waste. Why not limit Drax to burning only sawmill wastes, since the company will be generating so much less power, anyway? It’s time to put an end, now, to burning trees for energy. And since the government has no intention of actually monitoring biomass provisioning in a meaningful way – they just told us that – requiring 100% of wood biomass to be sourced from sawmill waste would be at least somewhat protective.
Burning biomass is not “zero carbon” despite absurd rationales
DESNZ acknowledges there are millions of tonnes of CO2 pouring out of Drax’s smokestack, but provides a unscientific rationale for why this is instantaneously “offset”. It’s worth printing the rationale in full because it requires scrutiny. After 16:54:06 in the full video, and excerpted below, J. Pocklington explains that biomass proponents claim that CO2 emitted by biomass is “offset essentially the CO2 that is captured by the continuous growth of the forest. So you need to look at this at the system level, and that’s the basis for arguing that biomass can be a low-carbon technology. Now if under power BECCS you go further, and you capture that carbon at the end, that’s when you can start to get the net in the net zero. So that’s the argument for it but I recognize that it’s a sensitive… I recognize there are a range of views on this issue and that ultimately this will be a very scarce resource.”
The Chair remarks, But it takes many decades to reproduce those trees!
Just listen to this gobbledygook in response:
J. Pocklington: : “So again, you’re getting sortof to the level of principle here, and I would… I recognize there is a range of views on biomass. Proponents would say, you need to assess this at the level of the forest, not the individual tree, and whilst it is true that when you burn a tree you’re releasing carbon dioxide, if you believe the forest is sustainably managed, and that the carbon stock of the forest is being protected, that is more than offset by the CO2 that is captured by those trees as they are growing. And that’s the argument for it. It’s a highly technical area… you’re then going to get into a whole range of arguments as to what would actually happen if you didn’t remove the sortof low residue from the forest and you are afraid you are taking me there, Chair, it’s not the case that the forest would remain just as it was, the forest would have to have been managed, what actually happens often is that the trees are then discarded, a lot of them are sortof burnt at the roadside, but what’s really important is (indistinguishable) having a strong sustainability regime, hence the hearing we’ve talked about at the start of this, sorry, hence the issues we’ve talked about at the start of this hearing, and that we create a system whereby we prioritize higher quality uses of the wood.“
Worth highlighting here is that among all the other problems with this statement, the claim that trees logged for biomass “would otherwise be burnt at the roadside” is another point of fantasy on a par with Dr. Redwood’s claim that biomass is mostly sourced from industrial wood waste. It’s also important to note how closely this mirrors Drax’s own claims, for example at their webpage where they state that 80% of their feedstock from Canada is sawmill residues, and “The rest is waste material collected from the forests which would otherwise be burned to reduce the risk of wildfires and disease.” Mr. Pocklington appears to have been coached by Drax. The full clip is below.
CLIP 2
If it’s not clear why this is wrong, imagine a lump of carbon – say, coal. Now picture that coal burning and emitting carbon pollution. If someone told you that the coal is “carbon neutral” because trees somewhere are growing and taking up CO2 out of the atmosphere, you’d say they were crazy. But that is essentially what J. Pocklington is claiming. Trees are also lumps of carbon, not that different from coal, and when you burn them, this emits CO2. That CO2 does not magically disappear because trees somewhere are growing and taking up carbon. (And unlike coal, trees do have the somewhat magical ability to convert CO2 into more tree-carbon… so the act of cutting and burning a tree not only emits CO2, but reduces its uptake from the atmosphere).
Or try this. Imagine if instead of working on climate, J. Pocklington worked on the government’s finances and made the following argument: That the government can spend down all of the capital in a certain interest-bearing fund (analogous to clearcutting certain forests), but as long as there is still some interest being earned on other accounts held by the government (other forests somewhere else still continue to grow), the total amount of money held by the government (carbon held in forests and kept out of the atmosphere) will not decrease.
That’s ludicrous, and would never be tolerated in the financial world, but somehow these policymakers are willing to repeat such nonsense when it comes to trees and climate.
It’s also important to note that even the Sustainable Biomass Program, the private certification scheme that Drax uses to show it’s complying with UK criteria, disavows claims of carbon neutrality for “sustainable” biomass, stating “an SBP claim should not be misrepresented as a guarantee of carbon savings, nor should it be associated with claims of carbon neutrality” or even that biomass delivers carbon savings compared to fossil fuels. That’s the main international certifier of biomass saying, “SBP-CERTIFIED FUEL DOES NOT REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS COMPARED TO FOSSIL FUELS.”
And BECCS with forest biomass won’t deliver “negative emissions”
See above for J. Pocklington’s rationale on why BECCS can “put the ‘net’ in net zero.” But in reality, unlike with DACCS, which can at least in theory actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it, BECCS with forest biomass simply moves carbon from one non-atmospheric pool – trees – to another non-atmospheric pool – belowground storage. The carbon that’s being shuffled around around was removed from the atmosphere decades to centuries ago. The situation is analogous to that of harvested wood products (HWP), which as the 2019 refinement to the IPCC Guidelines explains (p. 12.7), do not provide “removals” from the atmosphere: “In the context of HWP, when referring to CO2 removals, it may be noted that HWP do not directly sequester carbon from the atmosphere. …carbon retained in HWP constitutes a pool of carbon that was sequestered originally by the above ground biomass carbon pool of forests and other wood producing land categories”
In other words, there is no new “removal” of CO2 occurring when forest biomass is burned with BECCS. See our backgrounder for more detail on why the UK government’s dependence on BECCS using forest biomass is a dangerous dead-end.
DESNZ claims to be working with the IPCC, but we have questions…
Nor is the IPCC, the international body in charge of how countries report their greenhouse gas emissions, likely to start treating BECCS with forest biomass as delivering “negative emissions.”
This question of the IPCC’s approach should be considered in the context of a question (full clip below) asked by Chris Hinchliff about how the IPCC does not consider biomass to be carbon neutral; and further, can the government be confident that the US will count forest carbon loss correctly now that it’s left the Paris Agreement. This question was followed by a Rather Long Silence on the part of the witnesses.
We wish that MP Hinchliff had simply asked why the government thinks that the fact that biomass carbon is counted as being emitted in the country where it is sourced somehow negates the warming impact of CO2 on the atmosphere, which is essentially what the government’s treatment of biomass as “zero emissions” equates to.
But in any case, the government’s answer here is really something. Ashley Ibbett of DESNZ says they “worked very closely with member of the IPCC” on the “arrangements in this space”.
If that’s the case, it would be good to know who that “member of the IPCC” was that they talked to, and what those discussions entailed, since as we’ve demonstrated, applying the current IPCC reporting protocol to BECCS with forest biomass does not even yield “zero” emissions, much less “negative” emissions. If the alleged IPCC member was truly playing straight with DESNZ, then the government is likely sitting on some very bad news indeed about their BECCS plans.
Furthermore, the IPCC has not even yet developed the rules for how countries get to claim carbon stored with CCS (note the difference between “storing” CO2, as can be done with gas and coal – and trees! – as opposed to “removing” net CO2 from the atmosphere, which is currently mostly a fever dream involving fast-growing crops – not trees – and is still to be demonstrated).
Here Dr. Redwood chimes in, falling back on the “need to avoid double counting” excuse as a reason for UK to not count biomass carbon that’s harvested in the US – though somehow she unblushingly does this without acknowledging that yes, all that carbon – the biomass emissions that occur in the US and the UK when forests are logged and burned for fuel – warms the climate.
The Chair asks the witnesses to explain how the IPCC will decide what country gets to claim carbon stored with BECCS, and the witnesses fumble this, too, making it sound as if it’s they, themselves, that are involved in deciding this, when in fact it’s an IPCC process that will take years to decide. J. Pocklington chimes in that at least the fossil fuel emissions from making and transporting biomass are counted, wherever they occur – but fails to note that as these emissions occur in other countries, counting them in the UK represents exactly the double-counting that they are so desperate to avoid when it comes to the biogenic CO2 emissions from burning the biomass itself.
CLIP 3
There are still investigations and consultations left to go. But we believe the government has demonstrated that they can not be trusted to represent basic science to lawmakers, as they continue to use the same old talking points to support biomass and Drax that have been used over the last ten years. Given the enormous role currently envisioned by the government for biomass and BECCS, it’s time they were a lot more transparent about the real impacts to forests and the climate.
