How one power plant chips away at the UK's carbon footprint - Fireplace.co.uk FAQs | ABOUT US | CONTACT US How one power plant chips away at the UK's carbon footprint By burning wood pellets instead of coal Drax power station, one of Britain’s biggest polluters, has turned green Converting a coal-fired power station to one that burns wood might sound easy enough, until you see first-hand what is involved. It is only when you stand in the middle of the sprawling Drax power station near Selby in North Yorkshire – the biggest in Britain – that you realise the sheer scale of Europe’s largest decarbonisation project. The first thing to hit you is the difference between how the coal and the wood pellets are stored on site, and the incendiary reason why. While the vast store of coal is spread out, open to all weathers, the bone-dry pellets have to be protected from the elements in four huge storage domes 50m (164ft) high – about 30 per cent taller than the Royal Albert Hall. Whereas coal is fed into a power station when wet (it quickly dries out when milled into dust for the furnace), the wood pellets become unusable if damp.

So they have to be kept dry inside their storage domes, which themselves have to filled with nitrogen gas to limit the risk of spontaneous combustion. But this is just one of the many differences between the old and the new Drax. Converting a power plant from coal to biomass fuel has never been done on this scale anywhere in the world – and the engineering involved has broken new ground. Drax, named after a neighbouring medieval village (not the fictional James Bond villain created by Ian Fleming), is Britain’s largest power station and was once its single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide thanks to its huge appetite for the dirtiest of all fossil fuels – coal. Drax’s six huge, electricity-generating turbines can each meet the power needs of a city the size of Leeds. They are driven by the superheated steam from six giant boilers or furnaces, each weighing about the same as 32 blue whales. They rely on the heat of the power station’s six units, now partly powered by biomass in the form of compressed wood pellets imported from commercial forests overseas, mostly in the eastern United States and Canada. Two of the six Drax units are fully converted to biomass.

A third will be burning 100 per cent wood pellets later this year at a total cost of some £700m – and the woman in charge of Drax doesn’t want it to stop here. “We stand ready to convert a fourth unit,” says Dorothy Thompson, the chief executive of the Drax Group – who, since she joined the company 10 years ago, has pushed through one of the world’s most ambitious decarbonisation projects, which some experts had doubted as workable. “We used to be the biggest carbon emitter in the UK by site, which was rather unpleasant at the time. We were the centre for a lot of protests, and actually we were not comfortable with it ourselves,” Ms Thompson says. “At the time it was simply thought not possible to burn biomass in a unit of any size that had been used to burn coal… The government was worried that biomass was just a way of continuing the life of coal. We said ‘what if we burned biomass on its own?’,” she says. The electricity generated by Drax accounts for about 7 or 8 per cent of the total power of the National Grid, some 27 terawatt hours of electricity – enough to power about six million homes.

The two, 100-per-cent biomass-burning units at Drax alone account for some 12 per cent of the UK’s total renewable-electricity generation, according to the company. The idea behind biomass is simple enough. Wood fuel is in theory a renewable carbon source, because you burn the carbon that has been recently absorbed from the atmosphere by living vegetation, not the carbon of fossil fuel that has been locked underground for millions of years. If you burn wood pellets from the waste cuttings of the timber industry in a converted coal-fired power station, it should be possible to produce electricity that is largely carbon-neutral, provided the carbon of wood fuel is replaced by the carbon of growing trees – which Drax insists is the case. Of course, there is fossil fuel carbon that is used – for instance in the conversion of wood waste into dry pellets, and the oil used in the shipping and transport from America to Yorkshire. Even so, Drax estimates the carbon savings compared to coal are still above 80 per cent. But not everyone is convinced that biomass is that renewable.

Environmentalists have criticised the government’s encouragement of biomass burning on the grounds that it has resulted in forests being chopped down without a serious audit of carbon sustainability, as well as other environmental costs, such as the effect on forest wildlife and biodiversity. Ms Thompson accepts that there is “good and bad biomass”. But she insisted that the biomass carbon from the working timber forests of North America is from waste cuttings – and never simply from trees chopped down wholesale for biomass burning. “There is no question there are good ways to buy biomass and there are bad ways to buy biomass. Bad biomass uses an awful lot of carbon in its collection, transport and delivery and comes from sources that are not sustainable,” Ms Thompson says. “Good biomass is very low carbon right across the supply chain and comes from a truly sustainable source. All the biomass we burn is good biomass,” she says. “The first thing is that it must come from a sustainable forest. The second it that it must be low carbon, and we measure the carbon cost at every single point across the supply chain. The biomass we burn here at Drax accounts for 86 per cent of the carbon savings compared to coal,” she explained.

Each stage of the process, from forest, to wood-pellet production, to shipping and burning at Drax, is audited independently by outside contractors, Ms Thompson emphasised. “The reason why I can be very confident that we are doing the right thing is that since 2008 we have audited our compliance with those rules. We use low-grade wood from working forests and, essentially, if we weren’t using it, it would probably go to waste,” she says. “We are not simply cutting down forests. These forests are grown for their valuable saw log… We’re taking a sliver out of something that’s growing all the time.” Drax has contracts with American timber companies extending over the next 10 or 12 years. It currently uses about 7 million tons of biomass waste each year, which is a fraction of the 93 million tones of biomass waste produced annually in the US alone, Ms Thompson says. But the big question for 2016 is whether the Government will continue to invest in Britain’s biggest decarbonisation project in its next round of renewable-energy subsidies.

Drax needs these renewable subsidies to continue converting its three remaining coal-fired units – although it can operate if it has to on just the three existing biomass units. The signs so far are not looking good. Although the Government says it is committed to cutting carbon emissions and phasing out all coal-fired power stations by 2015, it has cancelled its flagship carbon-capture and storage project, to the deep disappointment of companies still in the fossil-fuel business – including Drax. A cathedral of power that has become the dirty dinosaur | Daily Mail Online A cathedral of power that has become the dirty dinosaur By MICHAEL HANLON Last updated at 19:56 15 June 2007 From up here, I can see maybe 60 miles in every direction. To the north, the crisp outlines of York Minster, with the North York Moors beyond; to the east, the twin towers of the Humber suspension bridge and the North Sea (a brown smudge on the horizon). It is a wonderful view.

I am perched, rather precariously (there isn't much in the way of safety fencing), on top of Britain's tallest chimney, some 850ft above the plains of North Yorkshire. This is the highest point of what is, in many ways, the most extraordinary edifice in the country. Below me is a gargantuan, thrumming cathedral of power that almost defies description. Each of its dozen steam-belching cooling towers, which surround the chimney on which I'm perched, is the height of St Paul's. This is the biggest, baddest, dirtiest machine in the country. Welcome to Drax Power Station: carbon dioxide central, "Draxosaurus" to the Greens, and the biggest single producer of the global-warming carbon dioxide gases in Western Europe. Drax - even its James-Bond-villain name sounds sinister - is Biblical in scale: a Brunelian, brutal, orgy of pig iron, roaring flames, clanking conveyors, steam and whirling turbines. Like a vast ocean liner beached on the Yorkshire flatlands, this power station is the last gasp of old, steam-powered Britain - and it is still going strong.

Yet most environmentalists believe that the time has come when Draxosaurus must be made extinct. I am here as part of a charm offensive by Drax's owners - a stand-alone UK-owned company - who are painfully aware that their station is now in the environmental spotlight. Every year, it produces some 21 million tons of carbon dioxide - a little under 4 per cent of the British total. To put this enormous figure into perspective, that is the equivalent to the "carbon footprint" of some two million Britons. If you drove a Ferrari to the Moon and back, you would emit as much CO2 as Drax does in six minutes. I do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. "You produce about three-quarters of a ton of CO2 every second," I tell Dorothy Thompson, CEO of Drax Power Limited. "Oh dear, that is a terrible figure, when you put it like that," she says. Somehow, 221 million tons a year" seems less alarming than the realisation that Drax emits the weight of a small car, in carbon, every second, 3,600 seconds an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

For decades, the Greens targeted nuclear power, chaining themselves to the gates of Windscale and screaming against the Sizewell power station on the Suffolk coast. But now that many of them have realised - uneasily and belatedly - that the hated atom may be more of a solution than a problem, they have turned their sights on this behemoth. Last summer, several hundred of them set up a "Camp for Climate Action" outside Drax. They sang, they chanted, they painted faces and danced salsa and tried (unsuccessfully) to charm the locals - 600 of whom have well-paid jobs at the power station - who continue to refer to these interlopers as "loonies". Then a few of the more determined "loonies" broke in, hoping to sabotage Drax and shut it down. But they failed - and a good thing, too. Because if they had succeeded, the results could have been catastrophic - and not just for the protesters, who would probably have lost their lives in the process. To see why, consider the statistics.

Conceived in the white-heat of the 1960s and finally completed in 1985, Drax produces, on its own, some 7 per cent of all the UK's electricity - more than four gigawatts, at full pelt. That is enough to light up Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield - or, at a push, half of Greater London. When demand on the grid is very low - say, on a warm summer morning - Drax could, in theory, keep the whole of Britain going on its own. Its six massive 660-megawatt turbines, each the size of a bus, are powered by as many huge boilers, each the size of a 15-storey office block, into which coal dust is blasted at hundreds of miles an hour and burnt at 1,200 degrees. The sheer scale of the installation is hard to grasp. The turbine hall is more than a quarter of a mile long, and the workers have to get around it by bicycle. Vast caverns of machinery spiral into the sky, producing an incredible racket. In some ways, this is a hellish place.

I am told the steam that drives the turbines comes out of the boilers at some 570c (hot enough to make steel glow red), at a pressure of a ton per square inch. "It can cut through steel," one of the workers says cheerfully. "Nasty stuff, super-heated steam. You really don't want to get anywhere near it." Despite the dust, heat and din, the Drax staff seem devoted to their baby. With their help, I take a closer look. Far above the ground, earplugs in place to keep out the skull-cracking din, I see a crazy, spaghetti-like maze of ducting, and conduits - water pipes that look small from where I'm standing but are, in fact, half as wide again as the Channel Tunnel. Emerging from the generators run by the turbines are the massive steel cables that carry the electricity. They crackle and hum, throbbing with 440,000 volts of pure power. Just one of these cables, a few inches across, carries enough power to light up, say, the city of York.

At one end of the station sit Drax's starter-motors, which will be used to get the station going again, should it ever be shut down. These are, in fact, Concorde engines: Rolls-Royce Olympus gas turbines. Nothing else on Earth, I would bet, uses Concorde engines as starter-motors. It all looks impossibly complicated, but Drax is actually a remarkably simple machine that has more in common with the world of Brunel and Stephenson than with today's electronics and clean, white power. In effect, it's no more than a giant steam engine, or a huge kettle. Large quantities of water are heated and turned into steam. This steam goes through turbines, making them spin. The spinning turbines then drive generators, which make electricity. The fuel for boiling the water is coal - and Drax uses a lot of it. That's where all the carbon dioxide comes from, because coal, of course, is a fossil fuel that produces the much-hated gas when it burns. "You see that pile over there?" says my guide, Pauline, as we drive round. She is pointing at a black hill of coal, about the size of a small stately home.

"That is one day's-worth." We may think that the days of coal have been and gone, but Drax gets through 36,000 tons a day (half of it British; the rest imported from countries such as Russia and Poland). That's 10.2 million tons a year - or about one ton every three seconds or so. The trains that bring it have to return so quickly for another delivery that they don't even stop as they trundle through the unloading bays. Burning this much coal takes some impressive kit. Those six boilers are voracious, gaping maws that swallow the coal as fast as the cacophonous mills can grind it into pepper-fine dust. Ignited, the dust burns with a brilliant flame, visible through the boilers' small observation windows. So what of the future? Well, there is certainly a prima facie case for getting rid of Drax; after all, if every SUV in Britain were replaced tomorrow by a fuel-efficient hybrid car, the difference this would make is probably less than if you simply tweaked the output on one of Drax's turbines. But it is not so simple.

If the climate-change campers had got their way, the immediate loss of Drax's generating capacity would have caused a major crisis. Some of the National Grid might even have shut down, plunging large parts of the country into blackout. Since privatisation, Britain's Byzantine electricity industry (a melange of mostly foreign-owned firms) has simply never had the excess capacity it would need to deal with the failure of such a large power plant. And demand continues to rise. Then you need to question the wisdom of targeting Drax simply because it is the "biggest". If Drax goes, then another plant automatically becomes the biggest polluter. So do we then shut that down? And then the third-biggest? Where, logically, do you stop? Drax is certainly making efforts to be green: it claims that it is currently the most efficient coal-fired generator in the UK. I was shown their "biomass" store, a huge smelly pile of wood-chippings and compacted plants that is mixed with the coal.

Biomass is "carbon neutral" - the CO2 released when it is burned is cancelled out by the CO2 the plant has taken from the atmosphere - so it shaves a few fractions of a per cent off Drax's Yeti-sized carbon footprint. In fact, apart from the climate-changing carbon, Drax is remarkably "clean". Chemical "scrubbers" remove nearly all the noxious chemicals - such as sulphur dioxide - from the waste gases (sulphur dioxide from power stations was largely responsible for the acid rain scare of the 1980s). The ash is turned into gypsum and concrete, which is gobbled up by the building industry. The gas that comes from the chimney is colourless, odourless and quite "safe" (if you discount the effects of the CO2 on the planet's climate). But the carbon problem is inescapable. Because natural gas continues to grow more and more expensive (ours is running out, though that nice Mr Putin will sell us some of his - at a price), it is actually becoming more economic to burn coal rather than gas to make electricity. This means more CO2 (because coal is an inherently less efficient fuel).

The Greens may yet have their way, although any sabotage is more likely to be done by the EU than face-painted "loonies" equipped with wire-cutters (the 1,800-acre site is now surrounded by high-security fencing). New rules, due to come into effect in 2015, will force Drax to become even cleaner, removing not only sulphur but the final noxious nitrogen-compounds from its exhaust. This will not come cheap, and it is arguable whether the company that owns Drax will be able to remain competitive. The truth is that Britain has been sleepwalking into an energy crisis for years and only now does the Government appear to have woken up to this. The older coal stations (Drax is actually the most recent) are closing, as are most of the nuclear plants. By 2025, we will have a very serious electricity shortage, every bit as bad as during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Like it or not, we need Drax for now.

A plan to save the planet - Yorkshire Post A plan to save the planet 13:32 13:55 Friday 30 April 2010 Dorothy Thompson is boss of the largest coal power station in Europe and she is in charge of turning Britain's biggest carbon polluter green. Roger Ratcliffe met her. There was once an idea among militant environmentalists that the men who controlled the world's gigantic, carbon-belching power stations must be like those megalomaniac Bond villains, hell-bent on destroying the planet. Nothing more resembled a movie location for this storyline than the trio of coal-fired stations in Yorkshire's so-called Megawatt Valley – Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax. The word Drax is of Saxon origin and is taken from the nearby village of that name. But it came to be suggestive of diabolical work going on behind the high perimeter fences. James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, even named the villain in his novel Moonraker – you've guessed it – Drax. For years, it almost seemed that Drax (the power station) was keeping to a Bond script.

As the largest coal-fired power station in western Europe it was a major source of the acid rain which sterilised hundreds of Scandinavian lakes, leaving them devoid of all fish and plant life. It was said to pump more pollution into the atmosphere than some entire countries. Enter the miltant eco groups, some clad in white plastic uniforms, as if sent by central casting. In 2006 more than 600 protesters gathered outside to set up a Camp for Climate Action. Some 3,000 police moved into action , and 39 people were arrested for trying to get into the power station. In the last episode, in June 2008, campaigners hijacked a coal train heading for Drax and shovelled tons of coal onto the railway line. None of this excitement affected the station's output. Desulphurisation technology at Drax has now addressed the acid rain problem. However, its single chimney – more than 300ft higher than Blackpool Tower and once in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's tallest – is still the biggest contributor to the UK's carbon footprint. But times are changing at Drax.

While continuing to generate seven per cent of the nation's electricity and be an important customer for the coal mined at Yorkshire's remaining deep mine pits like Kellingley, Hatfield and Maltby, the power station has been transformed into a permanent building site as it installs green technologies. In the shadow of Drax's cooling towers and colossal turbine hall are rising gleaming new facilities for the burning of carbon-neutral biomass fuels. Around them, stacks of timber and bales of vegetable matter seem to be stockpiled everywhere. It's as if the place has been taken over by Friends of the Earth. The feeling of a vast 007 film set is still here, however, especially in the station's nerve centre with its arrays of computer screens. This impression is heightened by a tall, attractive blonde called Melanie Wedgbury. She is Drax's head of external affairs, who greets me and happens to say in passing that her job is "as close as I'll ever get to achieving my ambition of being a Bond girl". We wait for the chief executive of Drax Power, Dorothy Thompson, to arrive. It's tempting to think Ian Fleming might have fictionalised her with a fearsome name like Madam Megawatt.

But when she makes her entrance, Ms Thompson, 49, is disarmingly friendly. In a cut-glass accent she is soon talking about her plans to construct three new "green" power stations in the region. Ms Thompson spends three days a week at Drax and the rest of the time in London where her husband and two children live. She earns green brownie points by cycling from their Islington home to the Drax Group's offices in the City rather than use the chauffeured limo that comes with heading a FTSE 100 company. She also glows with pride when she adds she has recently installed domestic ground source heating to tap into natural thermal energy, so further reducing her family's carbon footprint. "But I honestly don't see myself as a standard-bearer for green living. I'm not militant about it. I just think that everyone can be sensible and do something that makes a difference." She believes that climate change is a serious challenge, then adds hastily, as though sensing the disapproving frowns of old-school Drax boardroom suits, that this is not necessarily the official Drax view. "But however you look at it, the world is scarce in resources.

Therefore, I think it's important that we conserve those resources. By having very high carbon emissions, what we have been doing is effectively depleting very limited resources. It is in all our long-term interests, in terms of sustainability, to try and tackle the carbon problem." And so Drax has drawn up a long-term strategy for becoming a green business. Part of this involves what is termed "co-firing". That means burning petroleum coke at the same time as biomass fuels such as peanut husks, straw from grain crops and a giant grass, actually a rhizome, called miscanthus. By doing this, next year Drax hopes to reduce its annual carbon emissions by 3.5m tonnes. The impact will be like removing a million cars from our roads. But isn't Drax's investment in biomass technology principally because it will ultimately be good for profits? "Conceptually, I completely agree. Making Drax into a green business ought to make us more profitable in the future. And it will be a more robust, sustainable enterprise, more viable than fossil fuel businesses." Which is why Drax plans to build three new biomass power stations.

One will be at Immingham on the Humber, which is well placed for importing biomass fuels such as peanut husks from places like Georgia in the US. Another is envisaged on the north side of the present Drax power station. The third location has yet to be disclosed. From a company that had once been a byword for pollution and was targeted by climate campers, this is revolutionary stuff. But it left the Labour government, to misquote Bond, neither shaken nor stirred. Its official policy was to give far more financial aid to offshore wind farms than to biomass burners. All renewable, non-fossil energy in the UK gets now gets financial support, paid for by a small addition to everyone's electricity bill known as "the renewables obligation". At present, wind power gets fourtimes the amount of support that Drax receives for replacing coal with biomass. "But electricity from biomass is more expensive than coal or gas," Ms Thompson says, "so we need some recognition of the benefit that you deliver by reducing carbon emissions. We do need a higher level of support." After all, she adds, the wind doesn't blow every day.

In the low-carbon future, biomass will be an important way of ensuring the National Grid has enough electricity, in the way that Drax is already called on to fill the so-called TV Pickup – those mass power surges caused by the British getting off their couches to switch on kettles after Coronation Street. Yorkshire is mentioned a lot in her plans. Drax was originally built to take advantage of the Selby coalfield right on its doorstep. But that came and went in the space of 30 years. Now, she says, it's once again strategically placed to make use of energy supplies. More than 100 farmers are providing biomass fuels like willow, miscanthus and straw, and hundreds more are expected to join them to fuel the planned new power stations. For this purpose the world's largest plant for converting straw into high-energy pellets has been built at Goole. Drax won't discuss how much they pay growers except to say that biomass is a very worthwhile crop for many farmers. It's quite a twist to the story, I say, that a region which owes its past prosperity to coal now faces a future built – well partly – on straw. She smiles.

"But we feel very fortunate to be right in the middle of one of the UK's prime agricultural areas. Farmers are no longer allowed to burn straw and they also have marginal land where we think energy crops should be grown. This whole belt of Yorkshire has always been about energy and its use." There seems some doubt now about whether there will be any more James Bond films at the famous Pinewood studios. But if the producers are interested, how about Drax The Movie: One woman's fight to save the planet. YP MAG 1/5/10 Richard Neville | Drax Power Limited | ZoomInfo.com Drax Power Limited + Get 10 Free Contacts a Month Please agree to the terms and conditions I agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . I understand that I will receive a subscription to ZoomInfo Grow at no charge in exchange for downloading and installing the ZoomInfo Contact Contributor utility which, among other features, involves sharing my business contacts as well as headers and signature blocks from emails that I receive. Selby, North Yorkshire YO8 8PQ United Kingdom Company Description Drax Biomass in part of the Drax Group plc.

Drax is an innovative energy company that owns and operates the UK's largest power station in Selby, North Yorkshire, typically providing some 8% of the UK's electricity. A vital strategic asset, the Group has t ... more Find other employees at this company (320) Background Information Web References (40 Total References) Career FAQs | Drax Richard Neville - Head of Human Resources ... Richard Neville Head of Human Resources ... Richard Neville - Head of Human Resources ... Email: Richard Neville Drax Power Station Selby North Yorkshire YO8 8PH Telephone: Career FAQs | Drax Richard Neville - Head of Human Resources ... Richard Neville - Head of Human Resources ... [cached] Richard Neville, Head of HR at Drax Power, explains, "We are intending to develop three biomass-fired power plants from 2011 onwards, each of which will employ a substantial number of contractors during the three and a half year construction phase and a direct operational workforce after that. ... Neville continues, "In addition, Haven Power, which has enjoyed phenomenal growth over the last years, has a very high recruitment need- employing as many as five to ten new staff each week. ...

Tim Richards, Managing Director of Bond UK, comments, "Richard previously worked at Yorkshire Water - one of our longest-standing Bond Talent customers - and as a result of seeing the power and functionality of Bond Talent there, has very quickly brought us into Drax Power to provide the same level of service and support. Similar Profiles Green energy: How one power plant chips away at the UK's carbon footprint | The Independent Environment Green energy: How one power plant chips away at the UK's carbon footprint By burning wood pellets instead of coal Drax power station, one of Britain’s biggest polluters, has turned green Monday 4 January 2016 22:10 BST Click to follow The Independent Online The electricity generated by Drax accounts for about 7 or 8 per cent of the total power of the National Grid AFP/Getty Converting a coal-fired power station to one that burns wood might sound easy enough, until you see first-hand what is involved. It is only when you stand in the middle of the sprawling Drax power station near Selby in North Yorkshire – the biggest in Britain – that you realise the sheer scale of Europe’s largest decarbonisation project.

The first thing to hit you is the difference between how the coal and the wood pellets are stored on site, and the incendiary reason why. While the vast store of coal is spread out, open to all weathers, the bone-dry pellets have to be protected from the elements in four huge storage domes 50m (164ft) high – about 30 per cent taller than the Royal Albert Hall. Whereas coal is fed into a power station when wet (it quickly dries out when milled into dust for the furnace), the wood pellets become unusable if damp. So they have to be kept dry inside their storage domes, which themselves have to filled with nitrogen gas to limit the risk of spontaneous combustion. US town fears solar panels 'suck up all the energy from the sun' But this is just one of the many differences between the old and the new Drax. Converting a power plant from coal to biomass fuel has never been done on this scale anywhere in the world – and the engineering involved has broken new ground.

Drax, named after a neighbouring medieval village (not the fictional James Bond villain created by Ian Fleming), is Britain’s largest power station and was once its single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide thanks to its huge appetite for the dirtiest of all fossil fuels – coal. Drax’s six huge, electricity-generating turbines can each meet the power needs of a city the size of Leeds. They are driven by the superheated steam from six giant boilers or furnaces, each weighing about the same as 32 blue whales. Pictures that show we are killing our planet 21/21 Oil spill Getty They rely on the heat of the power station’s six units, now partly powered by biomass in the form of compressed wood pellets imported from commercial forests overseas, mostly in the eastern United States and Canada. Two of the six Drax units are fully converted to biomass. A third will be burning 100 per cent wood pellets later this year at a total cost of some £700m – and the woman in charge of Drax doesn’t want it to stop here.

“We stand ready to convert a fourth unit,” says Dorothy Thompson, the chief executive of the Drax Group – who, since she joined the company 10 years ago, has pushed through one of the world’s most ambitious decarbonisation projects, which some experts had doubted as workable. Explainer: Biomass fuel The wood pellets used as biomass fuel at Drax are made from low-grade wood such as forest thinnings, tree tops and branches, as well as residue from sawmills and agricultural waste such as straw and seed husks. The biomass is dried and compressed into pellets the size of peanut shells for easier and more economical transport. They have a lower “energy density” than coal which means that about twice the volume of biomass is needed to produce roughly the same amount of heat and electricity. This basic rule of physics, combined with the fact that the biomass pellets have to be stored dry in huge domes rather than spread out in the open air, means that Drax has moved from having more than 70 days of fuel stocks when it was a completely coal-fired power station, to having about 13 days of biomass stocks. “We have never worked on that timescale before.

We weren’t geared up for ‘just in time’ delivery,” said Jason Shipstone, the engineer responsible for the design, construction and commissioning of the new biomass facilities at Drax. It meant that Drax had to improve its lines of biomass supply from North America so that there was a continuous and regular delivery of the purpose-made wood pellets. They had to be compressed and dried before shipping across the Atlantic to the port of Immingham on the River Humber, where they are transported to Drax by a specially designed fleet of trains. Wood is also 100 times easier to ignite than coal, which posed a new kind of explosive fire risk. The pellets are so dry they give off a fine dust which can easily ignite, Mr Shipstone said. “We had to think of the dust coming off this stuff as gunpowder. So we had to think of the fuel as containing 8 per cent gunpowder,” he said. “We used to be the biggest carbon emitter in the UK by site, which was rather unpleasant at the time. We were the centre for a lot of protests, and actually we were not comfortable with it ourselves,” Ms Thompson says.

“At the time it was simply thought not possible to burn biomass in a unit of any size that had been used to burn coal… The government was worried that biomass was just a way of continuing the life of coal. We said ‘what if we burned biomass on its own?’,” she says. The electricity generated by Drax accounts for about 7 or 8 per cent of the total power of the National Grid, some 27 terawatt hours of electricity – enough to power about six million homes. The two, 100-per-cent biomass-burning units at Drax alone account for some 12 per cent of the UK’s total renewable-electricity generation, according to the company. The idea behind biomass is simple enough. Wood fuel is in theory a renewable carbon source, because you burn the carbon that has been recently absorbed from the atmosphere by living vegetation, not the carbon of fossil fuel that has been locked underground for millions of years. If you burn wood pellets from the waste cuttings of the timber industry in a converted coal-fired power station, it should be possible to produce electricity that is largely carbon-neutral, provided the carbon of wood fuel is replaced by the carbon of growing trees – which Drax insists is the case.

Of course, there is fossil fuel carbon that is used – for instance in the conversion of wood waste into dry pellets, and the oil used in the shipping and transport from America to Yorkshire. Even so, Drax estimates the carbon savings compared to coal are still above 80 per cent. But not everyone is convinced that biomass is that renewable. Environmentalists have criticised the government’s encouragement of biomass burning on the grounds that it has resulted in forests being chopped down without a serious audit of carbon sustainability, as well as other environmental costs, such as the effect on forest wildlife and biodiversity. Country now generating 95 per cent of its electric from clean energy Ms Thompson accepts that there is “good and bad biomass”. But she insisted that the biomass carbon from the working timber forests of North America is from waste cuttings – and never simply from trees chopped down wholesale for biomass burning. “There is no question there are good ways to buy biomass and there are bad ways to buy biomass. Bad biomass uses an awful lot of carbon in its collection, transport and delivery and comes from sources that are not sustainable,” Ms Thompson says. “Good biomass is very low carbon right across the supply chain and comes from a truly sustainable source.

All the biomass we burn is good biomass,” she says. UN climate change announcement “The first thing is that it must come from a sustainable forest. The second it that it must be low carbon, and we measure the carbon cost at every single point across the supply chain. The biomass we burn here at Drax accounts for 86 per cent of the carbon savings compared to coal,” she explained. Each stage of the process, from forest, to wood-pellet production, to shipping and burning at Drax, is audited independently by outside contractors, Ms Thompson emphasised. “The reason why I can be very confident that we are doing the right thing is that since 2008 we have audited our compliance with those rules. We use low-grade wood from working forests and, essentially, if we weren’t using it, it would probably go to waste,” she says. “We are not simply cutting down forests. These forests are grown for their valuable saw log… We’re taking a sliver out of something that’s growing all the time.” Pay more for energy to reduce climate change? No, say majority Drax has contracts with American timber companies extending over the next 10 or 12 years.

It currently uses about 7 million tons of biomass waste each year, which is a fraction of the 93 million tones of biomass waste produced annually in the US alone, Ms Thompson says. But the big question for 2016 is whether the Government will continue to invest in Britain’s biggest decarbonisation project in its next round of renewable-energy subsidies. Drax needs these renewable subsidies to continue converting its three remaining coal-fired units – although it can operate if it has to on just the three existing biomass units. The signs so far are not looking good. Although the Government says it is committed to cutting carbon emissions and phasing out all coal-fired power stations by 2015, it has cancelled its flagship carbon-capture and storage project, to the deep disappointment of companies still in the fossil-fuel business – including Drax. The question for Drax is whether it has a long-term future as one of Britain’s biggest, sustainable power generators; or whether it will limp on at half steam until its existing biomass contracts fizzle out at the end of the next decade.

More about: Place North West | First freight train leaves £100m Drax terminal First freight train leaves £100m Drax terminal 28 Oct 2015, 10:37 Phase one of Peel Ports’ £100m biomass terminal at the Port of Liverpool is complete, with the first shipment of wood pellets departing from the facility bound for Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire. The biomass terminal is being built to handle three million tonnes of wood pellets a year as part of the decarbonisation of Drax power station. The wood pellets will be shipped to Liverpool from North America and are a by-product of the saw-milling industry. The wood will be used at the Selby-based power station as a new fuel source. In moving from coal to biomass Drax will reduce its CO2 footprint by 12m tonnes a year. All of the wood pellets will be sent to Drax by rail from Liverpool to Selby ensuring there is no impact on the local road network. The terminal will feature a rail loading facility and storage capacity for 100,000 tonnes.

Drax is the country’s largest single generator of renewable electricity, producing almost 2,000MW of renewable power, enough for three million homes. A freight train with 25 specially-designed wagons carrying 1,600 tonnes of pellets left the port on Monday for the 99-mile journey to the power station. Andy Koss, chief executive of Drax Power, said: “This is the Northern Powerhouse in action; bringing east-west connectivity and driving business and economic growth between the north west and Yorkshire.” “This new Liverpool terminal adds to facilities on the east coast, bolstering our network still further. A robust supply chain is crucial as we continue to use the latest technology to transform the Drax power station to generate electricity using sustainable biomass, providing the UK with reliable, affordable, low carbon energy.” Already two cargoes of biomass have been discharged with another ship from North America expected next week. The terminal will eventually have the capacity to handle three million tonnes of wood pellets a year when fully completed in 2016. Graham Construction is the contractor for the terminal.

The terminal will contribute to the ambitious growth plans for the Port of Liverpool, with the company already investing £300m to create the UK’s most centrally located deep water container terminal, known as Liverpool2, which is due to open in December 2015. Liverpool2 will enable the port to handle the largest container ships in the global fleet while at the same time doubling the port’s container capacity. Sign up to Place Daily Briefing Freak power: how biomass is helping the UK decarbonise | The Engineer Freak power: how biomass is helping the UK decarbonise 11th September 2015 1:24 pm 16th December 2015 3:03 pm Senior Reporter Drax, the UK’s biggest power station, is slowly weaning itself off coal and replacing it with biomass. The Engineer took a look around to see what all the fuss was about. Drax. For me, the name will always conjure images of the Bond villain from Moonraker, portrayed on screen by Michael Lonsdale.

It also strikes me as one of the more obscure place names in the UK, sounding more like an industrial town in the Ruhr Valley rather than a picturesque village in North Yorkshire. The power station of course takes its name from the village, but it somehow seems to fit better with the concrete and steel of the chimneys, cooling towers, boilers and turbine halls that make up the facility. When I visited this week, the sky was an intimidating shade of grey, just as I had pictured it. As the UK’s largest power station, Drax provides between seven and eight per cent of the country’s electricity needs. Since it was built in the 1970s, that electricity has come almost exclusively from coal, making Drax the single biggest source of carbon emissions in the UK. Over the past number of years however, the plant has started transitioning to biomass, with two of the six generating units already converted, a third almost complete, and a fourth awaiting the outcome of a government decision. According to Drax, this makes it Europe’s biggest decarbonisation project, with biomass conversion reducing CO2 emissions by 12 million tonnes a year.

The Engineer has written extensively about the biomass conversion, having recently spoken with Drax Group’s operations director Peter Emery. The wood pellets that are pulverised to dust and then burnt to fire the station’s boilers come largely from North America, where Drax has invested millions in the infrastructure required for their production. This includes facilities for turning the raw materials into pellets, as well as railheads for transporting the biomass to ports. A train offloads biomass pellets at Drax Processing wood into pellets in Canada and the US – then shipping those pellets across the Atlantic Ocean – does not on the surface appear to be the most environmentally friendly supply chain. However, Drax is keen to point out that the wood it uses to produce biomass comes from harvesting residues such as limbs and branches, rather than the higher value saw logs used for construction and furniture. The sheer volume of pellets it ships also means that the carbon footprint from transport is relatively low. The CO2 emitted when the biomass is burnt has been absorbed during the life of the trees, making this part of the process carbon neutral. Overall, Drax claims the carbon emissions associated with biomass – including production and shipping – represent an 80 per cent reduction compared to coal.

According to Matthew Rivers, Drax’s director of Group sustainability who oversees the North American biomass operation, the partner organisations across the Atlantic have also been carefully selected to align with Drax’s sustainability criteria. One of the four massive biomass silos at Drax Perhaps more importantly, biomass could play a central role in the country as a whole hitting its emission targets, softening the transition to renewables. The UK is legally committed to a 15 per cent share of the energy mix for renewables by 2020, with an 80 per cent carbon emission reduction pledged for 2050. While progress is being made with solar and wind, these energy sources are by their nature intermittent and unreliable. Tidal power will hopefully provide a more stable source of energy in the future, but the investments required are large, and the technology is still at a low level of maturity. The cost and flexibility of biomass makes it a viable candidate to complement wind and solar, picking up the slack when conditions don’t favour those sources, while at the same time reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

Drax claims that to replace its current biomass generating capacity of 2,000MW with onshore wind would add £3.6bn to the costs of decarbonisation by 2020, and reaching the 2050 target without biomass would cost an additional £44bn. Ideally, one hopes that biomass, like nuclear power, will no longer be required one day, as cleaner forms of renewables evolve to fully meet our energy demands. In the meantime however, the priority needs to be reducing our carbon output by whatever means necessary. Compared to fossil fuels, biomass and nuclear offer a much safer path forward.

Question: Which name links a Yorkshire power station with a Bond villain?
Answer: DRAX