Action: Axe Drax
Since 2012, Drax Plc has morphed from a single-asset company, operating the UK’s biggest coal power station to now operating the world’s biggest wood-burning plant. It also aims to be the biggest producer of wood pellets globally, supplying companies across Europe and East Asia.
Drax states that the move from coal to biomass is “enabling a zero carbon, lower cost energy future”, and Drax power station is “Europe’s largest decarbonization project”.
However, Drax’s wood biomass pellets have been found to produce even more CO2 emissions from smokestacks than burning of coal did. Yet these emissions are allowed to be counted as ‘zero’ under international carbon accounting principles and EU and UK law. Plus Drax fells trees for the wood pellets from coastal hardwood forest in the US and areas of Eastern Europe, causing deforestation, and degrading our natural carbon sinks. Read more below...
Drax power station, in Yorkshire, emits more CO2 than any other facility in the UK: 11.5 million tonnes in 2023.
That is more than double the emissions from Port Talbot Steel Works, the second largest emitter in 2023. Pembroke Gas. With 4 million tonnes of CO2 was in third place in 2023.
Drax receives more than £2 million per day in subsidies from the UK government because forest biomass is still considered as carbon neutral in UK law. This is despite the European Academies Sciences Advisory Council (EASAC) statement that using woody biomass for power “is not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change.”
In return for burning huge quantities of wood from forests that are logged in the Southeastern USA, Canada, the Baltic States and elsewhere, Drax receives more than £2 million per day in subsidies. Thanks to those generous subsidies, Drax made £908 million in operating profits, up from £146 million in 2022.
Drax’s biomass electricity counts towards the UK government’s goal of decarbonising electricity generation by 2035, even though scientists around the world have warned that large-scale burning of forest wood for energy increases carbon emissions for decades if not centuries, and is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.
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Watch these videos to learn more about the Drax greenwash:
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