Drax, the world’s largest tree-burning power plant, emitted more than 13 million of tonnes of biogenic CO2 from its smokestack in 2024.
The company, and the UK policymakers who rationalize giving Drax billions in renewable energy subsidies, claim that burning trees and pumping millions of tonnes of CO2 into the sky has zero warming impact on the climate. Their rationales for this false claim vary, but they’re all wrong (you can hear their latest fabulations here). Importantly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world body responsible for developing rules on how to count GHG emissions, has been really clear: burning trees isn’t carbon neutral.
Now Drax has figured out a new way to ride the UK subsidies money train, claiming that if they capture some of this smokestack CO2, compress it, then and pump it into geological reservoirs – a process known as biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – this will actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and thus help the UK achieve it’s net zero target.
Drawdown of atmospheric CO2, sometimes referred to as “negative emissions,” is considered necessary by most climate models to avoid catastrophic climate warming. Drax is marketing its supposed ability to deliver negative emissions in both the UK and in the US, where its spin-off company, Elimini, is trying to attract interest and capital.
It hardly seems possible to come up with a bigger scam than claiming tree-burning is carbon neutral, but BECCS is worse. To explain why, it helps to contrast it with another technology, carbon removal via direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
DACCS technology chemically separates CO2 molecules from air, then either combines the CO2 with other materials to bind up the carbon, or injects concentrated CO2 into geological reservoirs. This technology works – there are examples of it operating – but it’s energy-intensive, and the net carbon removal benefit depends on upstream lifecycle emissions (if the process emits more CO2 than it captures and stores, then there is no net removal).
Unlike DACCS, however, BECCS does not pull CO2 out of the air, but rather (in the case of forest biomass) takes tree-carbon that trees removed from the atmosphere years, decades, or even centuries ago, and simply re-locates that carbon to belowground storage.
But moving carbon from trees to geological storage does not pull new CO2 out of the atmosphere. There is no “removal” happening. The situation is similar to that of harvested wood products (HWP), which as the 2019 refinement to the IPCC Guidelines for GHG reporting explains, can not be considered to be “removals”:
“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.”
The IPCC has initiated a process to consider questions about carbon dioxide removal technologies, including BECCS, but in the meantime, existing IPCC guidance highlights that it’s essential to distinguish between CO2 that is stored belowground with BECCS, versus CO2 that is removed from the atmosphere. BECCS using forest biomass may store some tree-carbon belowground, but unlike DACCS, it is fundamentally incapable of “removing” CO2 from the atmosphere at the time the CO2 is stored.
Additionally, the entire BECCS process emits large amounts of upstream CO2 from logging, biomass/pellet processing and transport, and extra fuel-burning to meet the additional energy demand of bolting CCS technology onto a biomass power plant. There is also a high probability of “foregone sequestration” adding to the net CO2 emissions – the CO2 that trees would have removed from the atmosphere, if they hadn’t been logged to provide biomass fuel.
The inability of BECCS with forest biomass to remove any CO2 from the atmosphere, combined with these very large uncapturable upstream emissions, means that forest biomass BECCS projects must never be considered as an “offset” for continued emissions of fossil fuels. Rather than counterbalancing fossil fuel emissions by removing atmospheric CO2, the overall effect of BECCS with forest biomass is to increase net emissions and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (and increase destruction of forests logged for fuel, as is occurring in Canada, the United States, and EU countries like Estonia and Romania).
One would hope investors considering investing in Elimini and other BECCS proposals have the basic math and logic skills to see through claims about carbon ”removals” by BECCS, though recent investments suggest otherwise (looking at you, Microsoft, with your investment into tree-burning in Stockholm). Sadly, UK policymakers still promoting BECCS apparently either don’t understand the difference between storing carbon versus actually removing it from the atmosphere, or are more interested in performative climate policymaking than in finding real solutions that will actually help the planet.
Let’s hope the investors can do better, because there isn’t much time.
